


Out of the Woods

by bob_fish



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Bickering, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Family Drama, Gen, Intrigue, M/M, Past Substance Abuse, Post-Season/Series 01, Property Damage, Time Travel, canon-typical jams, canon-typical sadness, coffee is the most important meal of the day, spookiness, tiny angry little human weapons, watch this space for tag and rating updates in future chapters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-12
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-01-12 08:41:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 60,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18443003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bob_fish/pseuds/bob_fish
Summary: In 2003, they stopped the clock on the apocalypse. Back in 2019, they find they've accidentally declared war on the people who want it restarted. Can the Hargreeves siblings survive another full assault by the Commission? Can they escape to Five's remote and inadequately-sized safehouse for long enough to come up with a plan? Do they stand a chance against the might of theTemps AeternalisCommission? Will they all murder each other first? And why the hell did nobody think to bring toilet paper?





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks are due! Skydark is the best of betas. Rad-hoodd/wearealltalesintheend and majure provided cheerleading and encouraged my rambling. And extra thanks to Rad-hoodd/wearealltalesintheend: her [awesome Klaus and Five Tumblr prompt fic](https://rad-hoodd.tumblr.com/post/183881679746/can-i-request-an-umbrella-academy-fic-one-where) inspired some of Klaus and Diego's run-in moment with the Commission goons, and she was super cool about it when I realised afterwards I'd inadvertently ripped her off, in fact she was lovely enough to encourage me. Go read her stuff!

The trouble with having stopped the apocalypse, it turns out, is that now you’ve annoyed the people who want it restarted. 

Diego had had big plans for after they’d won the day and prevented armageddon and gotten home safe to 2019 and all that shit. First, he was going to tell his Mom how much he loved and appreciated her. Then he was going to get his brother to conjure the woman he loved, just the one time (“no conjugal visits,” Klaus had wagged a finger at him, “I’m very easily embarrassed”). He was going to let Patch know that she could rest easy because he beat her murderer’s ass but also that, in a display of heroic self-restraint that showed what a catch he was, he had allowed the murderer in question to live. Then, serious business taken care of, Diego was going to order a jalapeño popper deep dish pizza from Zack’s and use it to finally win the argument about whether jalapeño popper pizzas sounded disgusting (Allison, Vanya), delicious (him, Ben, Klaus) or _sounds weird but if it isn’t freeze-dried MREs I’m in_ (Luther, Five). And after all that, Diego guessed he’d take a seat, chill, and maybe think about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. 

Diego isn’t chilling right now. Nobody’s chilling. Because five minutes after they got home, just as they were slumped at the kitchen table with Vanya shakily passing round the coffee, an unspecified number of gas-masked assholes with assault weapons busted in the windows. 

On the plus side, Academy teamwork is getting pretty okay. By this Diego means that, this time, the bickering is minimal before everyone agrees to Five’s plan: get them to follow Vanya to the roof and we’ll take them out from the top down while Klaus and Ben sweep from the basement up. When Diego adds, “And, Five gets Mom and Pogo somewhere safe, I’ll back up Klaus down here while he mojos up Ben,” (“Mojos up?” Klaus mouths at him), Luther replies only with a only a grumbling, “that’s what I was gonna suggest”. 

He and Klaus lured a couple of the suckers into the living room, by the clever strategy of getting spotted and running their asses away. The plan now is, cover Klaus while he does his thing and then carry on covering his glass cannon butt while Ben glows up and takes care of these assholes. It’s a good plan, a great plan. They’re going to mince a bunch of time travelling home invaders in time for Vanya to power down before she ends up destroying a city block, or a city, or a moon (yeah, she’s practiced, yeah she has a handle on it, but come on, they all worry). There will be fist bumps, there will hopefully be minimal structural damage although there might be some gross house cleaning, and then there will be jalapeño popper pizza. 

What actually happens is fast and nasty and pretty confusing, but it’s definitely not the plan. 

Diego and Klaus have gotten through the living room door, they’re skidding to get to cover behind the bar and Diego turns, flings a volley of knives to buy them a moment, when something _happens_. It’s like a tornado whips up from nowhere and lifts him straight into the air. As he’s spun up to the ceiling, legs kicking at nothing, he sees Klaus still down there on the floor, spinning around in the middle of his run to stare up at Diego, all big eyes and flailing skinny limbs like Bambi watching his mom get shot. The dick in the mask is pointing some device up at Diego, something flat and solid like a damn clothes iron of all things, and the air around it is rippling, and then Diego’s head spins and his ears pop like he’s in a fast elevator, and he smashes to the ground. 

He lays there stunned a moment, feeling like a swatted fly, then there are arms grabbing him, he’s on his feet with his arm slung over Klaus’s shoulder, stumbling forward —and then he’s on the floor behind the bar. 

Klaus’s hands are jittering over Diego’s torso. “Shit,” he mutters. “Shit shit _shit_.” Diego looks down at his own shirt, blinks dizzily, sees blood on his side. Klaus has yanked one of his remaining knives free and is trying to cut the harness off of Diego’s chest. 

“Hey, hey,” says Diego, annoyed and confused, _fuck, how did this turn around on them so fast?_ “Don’t—”

“Nope, gotta get it off,” says Klaus, in that all-business voice Diego still hasn’t gotten used to, “put pressure on the wound.” 

“Lemme up,” says Diego, and he can hear how stupid and woozy he sounds, “we gotta return some fire already—”

Klaus makes a sharp sound, then he’s up, head stuck under the bar, fumbling around there while Diego stares and thinks _oh you are not getting a drink_. 

“Ha!” Klaus mutters, and he comes out with a pistol stuck up under the bar with duct tape. “Dad,” says Klaus, and that explains that. “Paranoid old bastard.” His fingers move fast and practiced as he talks: he checks the magazine, slaps it back in, racks the slide. Then he’s up: he hops right up like a freaking jack in the box, pops off a bunch of shots and hops back down into a crouch. 

War certainly helped Klaus find his inner Number Five, that’s for sure. 

Diego, feeling slightly steadier, sits himself up and pats at his chest. The wound doesn’t hurt much; in fact, it’s weirdly numb. He yanks at his shirt and pulls, and—there’s only clean unbroken skin. He’s not shot. He thinks, relieved, ugh, some nosebleed, and he swipes his hand across his nose and mouth. 

Klaus very suddenly falls out of his crouch onto his butt, and his head rolls back on his shoulders and he’s flopped onto the floor before Diego can catch him, arms loose and face slack. 

The front of Klaus’s shirt is wet and red. 

Klaus stirs, pats at his chest and then raises a bloodied right hand, the _hello_ hand, to his face. His eyes cross a little as he frowns at it. “Oh,” he says. That’s all he says. He’s panting, dopey, quiet. The stain is actually spreading in front of Diego’s eyes from the hole in Klaus’s tee, somewhere near the bottom of his ribcage. 

Everything in front of Diego looks like a picture suddenly, flat and far away. Then it sharpens back in too fast, suffocatingly real, it clenches Diego’s stomach and sets his pulse thumping stupidly in his throat. That old feeling hasn’t rolled in on him so strong and fast in fucking years, of course it would be now. Diego lets himself have two rounds of box breathing: in for four, hold for four, out for four, hold. He’s good. _Move._

Diego retrieves Klaus’s pistol, shoves it in the back of his own pants. Neutralise threat, deal with casualties, evacuate. A sliver of light through the old wood of the bar catches his eye, and he leans forward, tries to peek through the gap. One guy is down on the ground, nice work Klaus, and yeah, that’s the one with the assault weapon. That leaves the dude with the weird sonic clothes iron Vanya gun. He can see the guy’s legs, he’s pacing. He thinks guy, but maybe it’s a girl, who knows, _sexist_ , Patch would say. Dickwad, perp, douche, those are all gender-neutral words, right? He’s got position on dickbag, and he shuffles back, hefts a couple of blades. Aim, throw, _curve_. Then there’s a satisfying thump. He peeks again. Douche is down. Blade in the neck, other blade in the thigh. He, she, they, _okay, Patch?_ move a bit, then they stop. 

Okay. 

Klaus is back in the room now: well, kind of back. He’s frowning, muttering, he flaps a hand. “Ben,” he says, “appreciate the concern but, could you, pretty please, for heaven’s sake, just zip it?” Then, with shaky dignity, “I am trying to concentrate.” Klaus balls his fists, his eyelids droop and he grimaces, Diego sees him trying to shake himself awake. A vague blue light blooms under Klaus’s clenched fingers, and then—right then and there Diego sees him fade, sees his face slacken and he grabs a wrist—

“Hey, idiot, you stop that,” Diego says, shaking the wrist, “cut it out, Klaus—” And the light fades and Klaus’s hands open, ah, thank fuck, and a voice echoes and fades in Diego’s head, _oh thank god, stubborn dick hasn’t been listening to a word I …_

“Ben,” Diego says. It just slips out quietly on the exhale. 

“Yup,” Klaus mutters. Diego grabs a bar towel, balls it up and shoves it firmly over the wound. Klaus doesn't flinch or grumble, and that gives him a nasty uneasy feeling. 

Klaus rolls his head, looks Diego vaguely in the eye. “Still hot out there?” Klaus says, voice soft, casual. Close up, he looks bad: grey and shocky. “I don’t see any, any pissed-off ghosts.”

“They’re down,” Diego says, into the quiet air. Then, “They’re all down, it’s done.” He doesn’t know that for sure, fuck knows what’s happening out there in the rest of the house, but there's no point having Klaus mess himself up worrying.

“Oh,” says Klaus. “Okay. Super.” And the frown slides off his face and he sighs, lets his eyelids droop. His thumb strokes over those dog tags he wears, and Diego’s stomach flips because he sees it coming, shit, why did he say that, he practically gave Klaus permission to check out. 

“Don’t—” Diego says, and his voice freezes. 

“G’night, bro,” says Klaus, a breathy quiet singsong, and his eyes close the rest of the way. 

A couple of moments later, the little asshole stops breathing. 

***

Klaus wakes up in the back of the jeep, rattling over potholes, jarring his wound and shaking his bones. It’s dark, and the sticky heat of the day has let up some. In fact, he’s freezing, shit it’s cold, they must be pretty high up in the mountains. Someone’s holding his hand. Bold move. He squeezes the hand back, smacks his dry lips together. “Hey Dave,” he mutters, “‘m parched, gimme your canteen.”

“Oh,” says someone. The voice is shocked, uncertain, too high, familiar. 

Klaus cracks his eyes open again, sees in the half-light someone small and slight, waves of dark hair, pale serious face. “Oh,” he says. “Vanya.” He blinks. “Your hand _did_ seem weirdly little, but, uh, I thought it was just me.” His mouth is so fucking dry, he feels like someone left him out in the sun or something, like now he’s a raisin. He’s not buzzed, but he’s definitely a little numb: there’s an ache in his side when he breathes in that promises to be very unfun later. He lets go of Vanya’s hand, goes to rub his face and stops when he feels a cannula in the crook of his elbow. He squints up, picks out the line, bags of IV fluid. Ah, hence the stoned head fuzz, hence feeling like shit on toast. What was it this time? He remembers zilch, so that must have been a good time while it lasted. What did he take, and why’d they call Vanya, was her number in his pocket, or?

Ben is sitting next to Vanya, cross-legged on the floor of the van. He looks at Klaus. He looks kind of mad. He’s always mad at Klaus, death has made him so damn judgy … “Next time,” Ben says, “that you’re bleeding out from a chest wound and you decide to manifest me, and I say _no, do not fucking do that_ ”—his voice cracks on the last word. He shakes his head. “How about you just do not fucking do that?”

Oh. Yeah. That’s what happened. “That’s fair,” Klaus says. 

“Ben?” Vanya twitches a hopeful smile, looks around. Klaus points out Ben with one finger. Vanya does a little wave in Ben’s vague direction. 

“He’s waving back,” Klaus says, as Vanya opens, wow, yes please, a water bottle. She feeds him some in sips. That's the stuff. “Thanks,” he says, “Wow. I needed that. Why’re we in a jeep?”

Vanya pulls in a breath. “It’s a van. We stole it. So, we’re kind of on the run. I guess.” She says it like the idea is ridiculous to her. 

“Who made it out?” he says. 

“All of us!” she says quickly. “Luther’s driving, Allison and Diego are up front. You’ve missed some truly stellar map-reading arguments.” 

Klaus grins at her. “Our boy Five actually let someone else drive?”

Vanya smiles, jerks her thumb at the corner where Five is burritoed up in a blanket, head pillowed on a backpack, out like a light. “He’s sleeping it off. He gave us a bunch of GPS co-ordinates then just, uh, took himself for a nap over there. Apparently he has a safehouse.” Klaus can feel the air-quotes around that last word. 

“What? How does—?”

She shrugs. “We have literally no idea. But it’s in the middle of nowhere. Up in the woods, by the Canadian border. Guess he was prepared.”

“Like a weird, murdery little boy scout.”

Vanya smiles over at Five. Can’t live with him, can’t live without him. 

“So, you saved all our sorry butts,” Klaus says. “Thanking you very much.” It’s a guess, but an easy one: Vanya’s dark shirt and sweater are bleached white in a patch from collar to shoulders.

Vanya shrugs. “I guess.” She smiles, though, taking the compliment uneasily. Klaus knows the feeling: _great work with the murdering today, have a cookie_. 

“I know,” he says, not specifying what he knows. “But, there it is. You did it, we survived. That’s what we’re in, baby.”

Vanya just nods, eyes big and nervous. Klaus has a sense she’s maybe contemplating the idea that they have all just accidentally gone to war, and not finding it so delightful. 

“You know you nearly died back there?” she says. “Diego says you stopped breathing.”

“Did he give me mouth to mouth?” says Klaus, delighted, because what a gift this will be for giving Diego shit. 

Vanya doesn’t even react, just carries on. “Five got you back. He was, uh, pretty amazing actually.” Klaus blinks. Five? Well, that explains why he feels like he’s had a modest but pleasant slug of morphine. Five and his mind over matter bullshit. He’s grateful, he’s pissed off, he’s blinking at the sheer novelty of being angry at someone for pumping free drugs into his system. He’ll deal with it later, he’s too fuzzy, he’ll just have to deal with it later. 

“I’m sorry,” Vanya says, clearly misreading the face he just pulled. “I really wanted to take you to an actual hospital.”

“Mom?”

“Five said she and Pogo were safer where they were. So.”

Klaus nods a little. So, they're safe too. He’s relieved. And he’s relieved a little extra for Vanya. Must be a weight off. She’s so twitchy and tender around Pogo now.

Vanya looks down for a moment, picking at her fingertips, then her eyes lock on him again. “You know—you really scared the crap out of us. Out of me. We—”

“Many apologies,” Klaus sighs, then slides right past the subject. “Anyone else get dinged?”

“Luther’s got kind of a goose egg here,” Vanya taps her forehead, “but he’s good. And I fell down some stairs on my butt, because I’m an idiot.” Her voice lowers. “Guess we were lucky.” 

Klaus circles a finger at her shirt collar. “So you whited out? Was it up on the roof?”

Vanya nods again, seems to slump into herself a little. “Just for a moment there. Then I had to stop.”

“Well. You stopped when you needed to. Progress.”

“Yeah. I—got a lot of them, but, after that I couldn’t. I didn’t know if I’d be able to stop. So then I was just kind of excess baggage.” An apologetic smile. “Trying to keep up with everyone and not get shot.” 

Ben says, “It’s okay, Vanya. We’ve all been there, we’ve all scared ourselves.”

Klaus says, “Ben says, it’s cool, we get it.”

“Thanks, Ben,” Vanya says to the air in front of Ben’s nose. “Now could you tell Klaus to please stop talking and get some rest?”

“Please,” says Ben, “you think he listens to a word I say?”

“Ben, Ben, couldja cut me some slack for once? I just—”

“Shut up,” Ben says, at the same time as Vanya says “I mean it, you need to,” and Klaus looks between them. Ben does silent finger-guns in Vanya’s direction, jiggles his eyebrows and grins. Klaus smiles at him, and he starts on a chuckle but then the hole in his ribs lets him know that laughing is a horrible idea, so he doesn’t. His exhaustion and his aches and the good old IV opioids and the reassuring company and the knowledge of temporary safety all begin to wrap warmly together around him. It’s a good soft feeling, floating then sinking down, and he’s never one to turn down a little peace and quiet. He lets himself sink. 

***

They’re screwed, is what.

The cabin has a delightful verandah. It was one of the things about the place that appealed to Five when he picked it out as a bolthole slash safehouse slash theoretical vacation spot (not that he ever used his vacation days) slash, just maybe, retirement pad. The big shady porch is sheltered from rain and sun, with a view of the woods and the lake down the hill. It’s perfect for a spot of birdwatching, or for sipping lemonade as the sun goes down, or for pacing frantically while trying to work out five-dimensional equations, fighting off a caffeine withdrawal headache, and contemplating the prospective brutal deaths of your family and the extinction of the entire human race. 

The Commission found them so fast. Five needs to know why. They didn’t find them back in 2003, didn’t see them overlaying their thirteen year old selves with such precision (Five congratulates himself) that it was barely possible to measure any temporal displacement. He’d sweated the details: what did they shift in the timeline, what did they change, what lessons and changed circumstance and muscle memory did they bequeath their younger selves (Vanya, what did they leave Vanya?)? What would prevent the ending of all but preserve the integrity of the timeline? 

It had taken months, five and a half months to be precise, of experiment and calculation for him to know what needed to be done, how to aim their finest shot and, with fingers crossed, try to make the return journey home. 

A leap of faith: to April 2nd, 2019, 0800 hours, hand in hand, with no briefcase and no certainty. Ben had looked at him as the electrical storm gathered, and Five had realised very suddenly that Ben knew full well what Five had left unsaid in attempted kindness, knew that the equations had not left Five as uncertain of Ben’s fate as he’d made out, had told him clearly Ben was probably returning to death. Did Ben know that Five hadn’t dared shift the timelines more? That Five was too cautious and bloodless, too hardened, too much of a coward to risk the whole world to save his brother?

Yet they’d won. “Ben says it’s cool,” Klaus had reported, his voice soft and sad, when they landed in the hall in 2019, when only six of them had landed there. “He says it’s okay, we did it, world’s still here, that was the point.”

Five hadn’t wanted to be forgiven. But he wanted the coffee Vanya brewed (the only one of his siblings who could be trusted to make a decent cup), he wanted the smiles and the relieved laughter and the bickering. He wanted Klaus putting up a hand to stop anyone sitting in the chair Ben had taken, wanted Allison’s voice restored and warming the room, Vanya’s shoulders starting to relax, Luther awkwardly hauling himself into a chair, Diego twirling a teaspoon around his fingers like a majorette’s baton and saying, okay y’all, about that jalapeño popper pizza. And then Allison groaned and shook her head at Vanya, and Klaus stretched his arms up and said ooh, we gotta get garlic cheese bread, and Five had been opening his mouth to make a pitch concerning Rita’s Frozen Custard—

—And then every window in the room had smashed at once, and the guys in masks had swung in, and all hell, to state the facts without hyperbole, had broken loose. 

The Commission had known they’d all be then and there (or that they’d been there, or that they would be there). How? The why, however, is insultingly obvious. If they killed Five with his family now, they were eliminated as moving pieces. Their timelines cut off, they could do no more to derail the end of the world. Then the Commission could tweak and fix and strategically liquidate whomever they pleased to set the apocalypse back on its tracks. 

“Vanya, we’ll get you to the roof,” he said, as they all took cramped temporary shelter in their father’s wine cellar. “You up to it?” She nodded, looking pale and overwhelmed, not ready at all. She could do it, he knew she could. He smiled at her.

Five found Pogo and Grace peppered with holes on the first floor landing. Pogo was dying rapidly; Grace was just Grace with a few extra holes in her shirt. She was stroking Pogo’s head and humming softly. 

“Jesus, Grace,” Five said, had spat out when he found them like that, “did you think to do something?” 

Grace looked at Five, soft and bland, his anger sliding right off her, and she smiled her toothpaste ad smile, and said, calm and easy as ever, “Darling, I am doing something.”

Five looked again at Pogo, at the blood pooling under him, the number of entry wounds, he catalogued the symptoms of advanced hypovolemic shock and he measured the look in Pogo’s eyes. He realised: Grace was utterly right. Comfort was all that could be done, the best thing that could be done for Pogo. 

He fastened an arm around Grace’s waist. She looked up at him and tilted her head, an innocent unstated question. 

Five reached out, he squeezed Pogo’s chilly hand. Pogo stirred. “I have to take her now. Someplace safe.” Then, because he should say it, “I’ll get the kids out of here in one piece. Don’t worry.” 

Pogo’s mouth moved, and then he nodded, muttered. Five thought he caught, “of course, dear boy.” Then Five tightened his arm around Grace’s waist, and he _jumped_. 

This safe house can’t be linked to him, Five tells himself. It’s remote. He was so very careful. 

Their casualties were pretty light for a full-on Commission assault, and he reckons they achieved a hundred per cent kill rate in return. It was very nearly worse. Klaus is a surprisingly resilient little s.o.b.

They got off easy this time. It won’t be like that next time. And there will absolutely be a next time. 

He knows they’re coming. They’re coming for him and his family. It’s all just a matter of time. Ha. Time. He smiles without humour, then shakes his head. 

(What does he do now, what should he do now? It’s all on him. This is Commission business. How could he even begin to explain the truth of the _Temps Aeternalis_ to his family?)

He paces. 

When it’s too unbearable to compute in his head, he fishes a stick of chalk from his pocket and scratches on the walls, then, when he can't reach any higher, the deck. After a while he gets that hollow dizzy feeling, as if the calculations are consuming him from the inside. He’s damn hungry, that doesn’t help. This body is too small and fragile, too ravenously hungry all the time, it tires too easy. Though it's nice to be this limber again, he’s not gonna lie. 

God, he misses Dolores. She’d say just the right thing to him now, she always knew what to say to get him out of a slump. 

And somewhere deep inside him, something twists, and he thinks with bitterness that he is a stupid old man, that he had gone soft to think that he was truly going to get a second chance at life, that he could do something as audacious as letting Dolores go and starting again, as audacious and arrogant as thinking he’d saved the world, that after everything he’s done he gets to become human enough to sit around the kitchen table with his family bickering about what junk food to order. 

“I’m too old for this shit,” Five mutters, to nobody in particular. 

Then he turns on his heel, thinking, maybe there’s something edible in the pantry—chips, saltines and jelly, something—and he strides back inside.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extra thanks due this chapter to majure/fanthings for a terrific speed-beta and a ton of creatively inspiring conversation about this gang of disasters. Anyone who likes reading chewy character drama, war, feelings, idiocy, true love and occasional Princess Bride references should check out their amazing Klaus/Dave chapterfic [Ten Months](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18214736/chapters/43091279), like NOW. (Disclaimer: I'm betaing it.) 
> 
> I've written the bones of this baby now and for anyone following, it's coming in at 6-7 chapters with a beginning, middle and end. Stay tuned for danger, possums in the garbage, sibling feels, shouting matches and the superhero team most likely to repeatedly burn toast.

As if on cue Five pops up, blinking himself awake, between Allison and Diego just before they hit the turning off the one-lane road. 

It’s an unmarked, undistinguished dirt track, heading off into the deep woods. 

“That’s it?” Luther says, as they make the turning and plunge into shade. 

“What did you expect,” Five says, rubbing his face, “the Four frickin’ Seasons?”

They rattle for at least twenty minutes up and down this winding dirt trail, thick forest on either side of them. The van skids and complains. Diego tuts to himself. Allison casts anxious glances to the back of the van, to Klaus too still and too small to be himself on that stretcher, and Vanya holding his hand, hunched in and lonely. 

The light is fading when they reach the end of the track: an aging two storey wooden cabin. It’s a dark mass in the half-light, but it looks old. And—quaint. Quaint enough to let in rain through the roof. 

“Hideout, sweet hideout,” Five says. 

Luther clears his throat. Allison can see him checking out if he’s going to bang his head on the porch roof. 

Personally, her eyes are on the crawlspace. That’s definitely got rats. Or maybe snakes, but wouldn’t those eat the rats? Allison really isn’t a fan of crawlspaces, not since that crappy basement apartment in Echo Park ten years ago. It was her first place alone in LA, and she felt so cool because her street was in that Beastie Boys video and Elliott Smith had died five doors down from her. Then one day the bottom dropped out of her grocery bag when she was on the driveway and she shone a flashlight under the crawlspace to look for dropped cans and instead found a whole family of copperhead vipers. She never got a full night’s sleep in that apartment again. 

“We’ll be safe,” Five says, reaching up to pat her shoulder. “Temporarily.”

Not from critters, she imagines, but: least of their worries right now. 

The cabin is a rustic dust bomb. Nobody’s been in here for years, it looks like. First thing they do is move Klaus to a back bedroom on the ground floor, and a cloud of dust rises as they lower his stretcher onto the bed. Klaus doesn’t even stir and it’s awful. Allison wonders if this is how it felt when they brought her in with her throat cut, that feeling like your stomach is wringing itself out, and the dread: Ben, is it going to be like Ben all over again?

Ben. He’s probably pacing up and down the room right now. She looks around; she can’t help it. She got used to having him back; she kept telling herself he’d make it alive to 2019. God, it isn’t fair. 

“Ben,” she says, looking around blindly. “Hi. He’ll be okay. You know Klaus, worrying us is his hobby.”

Vanya looks up from the chair she’s pulled up besides Klaus’ bed. “I think Ben’s mad at him,” she says. “Klaus was talking to him in the van.”

Allison swipes a hand over her face. “Oh god.” She exhales. “How are you doing?”

Vanya shrugs, blinks dazedly . “I don’t—I don’t think I’m processing—”

“You were amazing,” Allison says firmly. “You saved my life, you saved all of us—”

“It’s just—” Vanya looks down at her hands, curled around Klaus’s hand. “It’s weird. It’s like now there are two sets of memories on top of each other, it’s just hard to—”

“Well, it’s not like we exactly had time to deal.” Allison takes a slow breath. She knows just what Vanya is thinking. Time travel was weird enough on the way out, the whole Groundhog Day thing, reliving thirteen when it had been no fun the first time round and scheming what to shift without giving themselves away. 

But coming back to the present is a whole new layer of weird she hasn’t even had time to process. Two timelines in her head, two sets of memories … she doesn’t even know if she can keep them straight. 

She remembers she went to the cottage and Vanya was there, and the wind whipped up and the light fittings swung. She remembers she went to the cottage and Vanya yelled, “You destroyed my life!”

But she also remembers she was there, and Vanya didn’t yell, she put a hand to her mouth. She said, wondering, “Part of me, I’ve always known.”

Allison clapped a hand to her throat. 

Vanya stared in alarm at the violin bow, lying forgotten on a shelf. 

Vanya ran to her, hyperventilating. Allison took her hand from her throat, and found it dry. 

(The blood under her hand was shockingly hot, and it pushed out with force from under her fingers, like water from a faucet. Her legs gave way first, then her sight, and she remembers thinking calmly _oh, I’m dying_ as if it was some everyday incident, _oh, I need to get gas, oh, we’re out of milk_ —)

And in the other world, the world that was, they fell into each other’s arms, Allison remembers. They sprinted, shaking, to the car. 

“Something happened before—” Vanya said. 

“I know, I know,” Allison chanted. “Time out of mind.” She didn’t even know why she’d said it. 

She remembers they drove back to the city, gripping each other’s hands, without stopping once. They raided Dad’s bar and got roaring drunk on fancy Scotch. She remembers she woke up the next morning with a stinking hangover and Klaus poured them coffee, made bacon sandwiches. She remembers that mysterious sensation, like they’d turned a corner into a street that hadn’t been there before, that sense of being on the edge of revelation.

God, this is weird. 

She takes a chair from by the wall and pulls it up next to Vanya, drops into it. They look at each other, and Vanya manages a shaky smile. Their hug is long and tight and when it’s done, she feels a little steadier. 

From upstairs, someone is calling “Guys?” Is that Diego? Yeah. “Guys?” he calls again, high and stressed. “Guys, did anyone bring any toilet paper?”

***

“The girls should have this room,” Luther says, looking around the marginally nicer of the two upstairs bedrooms. It has two beds with fewer mysterious stains than in the other room, and a table by the window with a pot of artificial daisies, or at least he thinks that’s what they’re supposed to be under all the dust and spider-webs.

“The girls,” Allison says. “That's nice. Kind of Scooby Doo, Daphne and Velma.”

Luther thinks up three unfunny jokes and rejects them in quick succession. Not long ago, a lot of him would have wanted to roll with this whole road trip hiding out thing, half-convincing himself it would be an adventure. But nothing seems funny about this situation now. 

There was a whole two minutes flat, after they got back to 2019, where it seemed to him like they really had won. His biggest worry had been how it seemed wrong to be celebrating without Ben, even though he was technically kind of there, and how he wished they could all at least see him. 

How could he have thought it would be this simple, that the bad guys would just go _dammit, foiled_ , then give up and go home? Being thirteen made him feel how little he’s moved on: he’s a naïve idiot and he still hasn’t learned. 

“Jesus, Five,” Diego says, down in the living room. “I thought you were supposed to be good at this shit. This is supposed to be a bug out bag?”

Five looks withering. “It’s entirely adequate for emergency self-defence, so yes. I guess.”

“What’s a bug out bag?” Luther says, kneeling to get a better look. The rucksack Five had grabbed from somewhere, already packed, just before they moved out, has been emptied onto the dusty floorboards. The contents seem to be mostly weapons. Well, that tracks. 

“You know,” Diego says, “survival prepping. For when you’ve gotta get out of town in a hurry.”

“You’d know,” Luther says, automatically. 

“Well, seems like we needed one,” Diego says, snapping right back. “Maybe somebody shoulda thought.”

“Well, you didn’t either.”

“It was at my apartment!”

“You mean your basement boiler room at the back of a failing boxing club.”

“The club’s doing great, actually. Al just prioritises giving back to the community.”

The bickering is weirdly kind of comforting: familiar, habitual. Everything and everyone has been changing so goddamn much. Even without counting the fact that a few hours ago, relatively speaking, they were all thirteen and Luther was one and a half foot shorter. It’s nice to have a thing or two he can still wrap his head around. 

Briefly, it occurs to Luther that Diego might be thinking the same thing. 

“So,” Luther says. He surveys the items spread out on the floor. Dad’s old hunting rifle. An AR-15 semi-automatic from god knows where. A couple of .45s. Ammo. Grenades, and he's genuinely not sure where Five managed to find this many. A couple of the stiletto knives from the gym. (He remembers the moment, when they were back in 2003, standing in his child’s body with an adult’s mind, facing off against Ben for knife practice. He tested the blade and found it, as always, kept sharp enough to draw a drop of blood from your finger. And he'd thought, _Jesus, Dad, seriously?_ And he'd marvelled at how rarely they'd all questioned the insanity of it. How rarely he'd questioned it.) 

There's a medical kit there too, of a sort. Sutures and a needle, disinfectant, dressings and a bottle of strong painkillers. And antibiotics, that's relatively sensible. And at least there's no sign of Dad’s more creative medical interventions.

“Duct tape!” Five says, brandishing it in Luther’s line of sight, as if that wins him the argument. 

“So?” Diego pulls a face. 

“Apocalypse staple. It can do almost anything.”

“You can’t eat it, and you can’t wipe your butt with it,” Diego says, “so not so much.”

“He’s got a point,” Luther says. “I checked out the cupboards, there’s zip. So we’re doing great on grenades but not so much on basic necessities.” He exhales. “I’m gonna make a list.”

“We’re in _hiding_ , Luther,” Five says. “We’re not going to _Walmart_.” He’s got that tone he gets like, like he’s a teacher on the verge of losing his patience. “Supplies are plentiful. I’m sure we can scavenge.” 

“You mean burgle someone?” Luther says. 

“Nope,” Diego cuts in. “We’re not doing that.”

“Besides, it’s not like home invasions are going to be less conspicuous than grocery shopping,” Luther adds. 

“Fine.” Five rolls his eyes. “We’ve got everything we need here to trap rabbits.”

“I’m not wiping my butt with a rabbit,” Diego says. 

“You know what Freud would say about your anal fixation?” Five snaps. 

“Yeah. You want me to get him over here?” says a scratchy voice from the next room. 

“Klaus,” Diego says, standing. 

Luther looks up, sees Klaus on the bed through the open double doors, rubbing his eyes. “He’d say, take the playground slap fight outside. My valued, unbelievably chic, _very tired_ friend Klaus would like to sleep.”

He’s well enough to be joking. Some of the knots in Luther’s stomach loosen a little. Thank god. 

Diego strides over to Klaus. Luther hears him mutter, “Sorry, man,” hears Klaus murmur something in return. Then Diego is checking the bags on Klaus’s IV line. He unhooks one. Klaus is watching him as he does it. Diego pockets the bag. Klaus seems to nod, then turns his head away. Diego says, “You need anything?” 

Klaus makes a quiet little snort, like the ghost of a laugh. He says, “Water?” 

Luther wants to say something to Klaus, something like _thank you for saving each other, thank you for not dying_. But he has the feeling he's intruding already, that there’s something private passing between them. He looks back at Five. Five is looking down. That usual tense energy has gone out of his face. He looks slumped and worried, for a moment as if he really is just a kid again, a kid with too much on his shoulders. 

Five glances up at Luther, puts the scowl back on. He's himself once more, repacking the bag with brisk precision. 

Diego lifts the pill bottle right out of Five’s hand, then straightens up immediately as Five flails to grab it back. “This is gone,” Diego says. 

“It's medical supplies!” Five hisses under his breath. “You two were just lecturing me for being underprepared!”

“It's Vicodin,” Diego whispers back. 

“We are in a combat situation, painkillers—”

Diego leans right in, scrappy and confrontational. “My brother over there—who’s by the way a hundred seventy-two days sober, in case, y’know, anyone’s counting—just took a bullet in the chest saving my life. And I am fucked if I’m gonna let that be the reason he goes under again, after everything—” He shakes his head. “Five, why’d you give him that shit in the first place?” 

“To keep him alive, idiot!” Five shakes his head. “If you knew anything about the basics of treating chest trauma in the field, you’d know that pain relief—well, you don't, so.”

“A hundred seventy-two days,” Luther says. “Wow.” It sounds dumb and inadequate the moment it’s out of his mouth. 

Diego leans down, grabs another pill bottle from the floor.

“Those are the antibiotics,” Luther says.

“Oh,” Diego says. 

Five jumps from one side of Diego to the other, snatches the antibiotics. Diego tucks the Vicodin bottle in his jacket just as Five moves for it, then wags a finger at him, mouths uh-uh.

Five glares.

Luther stands. Time to break this up. “Diego,” he says. “Five’s got a point, he did just save Klaus’s life. Five, Diego’s right about the pills.” He turns to Diego. “Go flush ‘em.”

Diego spreads his hands theatrically, rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I was doing that anyway. Thanks for the permission.”

“I was trying to say I agree—” But Diego has already stomped off. “Never mind,” Luther mutters to himself. 

He sighs. It's been what, a full half hour since they got here? This is going just great. 

He's just settled himself on the stoop and put pen to paper when there's a yell from inside. 

“Diego!” It’s Five again. He sounds pissed. His voice sounds again, this time from the other side of the house. “Diego!”

Great. This is what it’s going to be like, isn’t it? They can’t go five minutes without someone shouting across the house loud enough to rattle floorboards. 

“Diego! What the hell did you do with my whiskey?”

***

The afternoon deteriorated from there, along pretty much the exact lines Diego thought it would. Five chewed Diego out for pouring his whiskey down the sink, Luther chewed Five out for keeping whiskey in his safehouse but no canned food, Diego told everyone he was going to check out that gas station store and nobody listened.

He returns to find the argument is still in progress, now with Klaus lying on the couch shoving a pillow over his ears, Allison telling everyone in turn to sit down, and Vanya sitting in the corner with her legs pulled up, that old familiar pose like she’s trying to make herself as small as possible. 

“Hey,” Diego says. “It’s really raining hard out there. Did anyone check if we got leaks?” 

The five-way yelling pauses for just long enough for everyone to look very alarmed—and not so much about the leaky roof. Vanya looks up. “Oh _shit_ ”, she says very quietly. The sounds of rain hammering the roof and walls cut off, just like that, like turning off a tap. Vanya looks around the room, nervous and rabbity. Then she just gets to her feet, mutters something like _sorry_ to the floor, and her feet tap up the stairs. 

“Well, that’s not great,” Luther mumbles. 

Klaus drops the pillow onto his own face and makes a dramatic huffing noise. 

“Thought she was getting better,” Diego stage-whispers. 

Allison gives them all one of her trademark hard stares. Diego would call it a mom special only she’s been doing it since they were like, seven years old. “I’ll go,” she says. “Gimme a moment.” She goes out the front. 

“So,” Diego says, “I went to that fill-up joint before the turn off, picked us up some basics.”

“What?” says Five. 

“You should’ve checked in with us first,” says Luther. 

“Well,” Diego says, “besides that you’re not my mom and I don’t need to ask every time I leave the table, I _told you guys_! Not my fault everyone was listening to the sound of their own voices. Anyway,” Diego holds up a finger for silence, or at least attention, “we got TP, food, water and soap. You’re welcome.”

“That was inadvisable,” says Five. 

“Well, it wouldn’t have been necessary if someone had kept this place stocked up,” Luther says. 

Diego finger-points at him. “See?” Not gonna waste a rare endorsement from Number One, especially if it aggravates him. 

Allison gives them all an emphatic eyeroll as she breezes past, heading for the stairs. She’s carrying Vanya’s violin case. 

“Is that such a great idea?” Luther says. 

“It’s hers,” Allison says with firmness. “And she says it helps.” Then she’s taking the stairs. 

A hand pats at Diego’s wrist. He looks down at the couch. Klaus is giving him big eyes. “Did you get candy?” he says. 

Diego goes to one of the grocery bags he dumped on the coffee table, fishes out a protein bar and throws it to Klaus. It lands on his face. 

“Really?” Klaus says, holding it up in front of his nose.

“Performance nutrition,” Diego says. 

“I took a bullet for you,” Klaus mutters, unwrapping the bar. “I deserve high-fructose corn syrup.”

Five has already jumped to the grocery bags to beat Luther to it. Luther gets to him a moment later, and they bat each others’ hands away trying to get to the snacks. 

Diego doesn’t tell any of them he already stashed all the real candy in the blanket box bench by the door. 

After everyone’s blood sugar levels have risen a little, everything seems to get thankfully better. Five takes charge of getting a fire going in the fireplace with a broken chair Diego kicks to pieces for him. Klaus grouchily accepts an Advil and water, then naps on the couch to the sound of Vanya’s lilting violin drifting down from upstairs. Luther makes the Velveeta shells and cheese in a big pot on the thankfully functional stove. 

When Luther calls dinner, Allison and Vanya come downstairs together, and Vanya’s actually smiling. They all search out plates and bowls and cutlery and chairs, and then they pile into the living room and eat around the fire. In the near-silence as they eat, there’s one of those weird, brief moments of harmony between them all. They are a kickass, apocalypse-averting band of brothers and sisters. They have forged their own destiny, escaped another assassination attempt, successfully cooked basic convenience food, gone almost an hour without a screaming argument. 

Five manages to ruin it all three minutes after they’ve handed round the candy bars. 

“So,” Luther starts, all upbeat and boy scout-y and socially awkward, “uh. I think we should follow the meeting structure we tried before.” He gets groans from around the room, but ploughs on anyway. “So we. Before we debrief, I think we should do ten minutes of appreciations.”

“Have we not been through enough today,” Klaus says, lifting his hands, “without compulsory group therapy?” Vanya catches his eye. 

“No, we’re debriefing first,” Five says. “That way when we’re done with the part of the meeting that has a point, I can leave.”

Diego’s torn for a moment between watching Luther crash and burn and doing the right thing. “Actually,” he says. God, he’s mature. “I feel like, you know, thanks are due.”

Luther spreads his hands. “ _Fine_. Thanks for going to the gas station.”

“ _Actually_ ,” Diego says. “I was gonna start by thanking my brother Klaus for saving my ass today.” Which is somehow becoming kind of a theme, apparently. “And for taking down that mook, nice shooting, and uh. Taking a bullet and scaring the shit out of me.”

Klaus pulls himself up on the couch and stares at Diego almost suspiciously, then darts his eyes around the room. “You’re welcome?” he says. 

Diego continues. “And thanks, Ben, for trying to talk some common sense into Klaus. Which as we all know is nearly impossible.” Klaus, returned to his comfort zone, flips Diego the bird.

Allison says, “And I think we should all thank Vanya, because she was amazing and saved our lives.”

“I thanked her already,” Klaus says. “I’m super considerate.”

“No, no, it was like, ten seconds,” Vanya says, shaking her head. “My control was terrible, I whited out way too fast. I’m sorry … Um, thanks for looking after me.” She gazes intensely at a spot on the coffee table, then visibly makes herself look around the room. “Thanks … Luther … for throwing that guy off the roof before he got to me so I could throw those other two guys off the roof who were going to throw you guys off the roof?” She shakes her head. “I mean, I guess the ideal amount of murders on a Tuesday is no murders, but y’know. There it is.” Her eyes flick over to Klaus and Diego catches a look pass between them, a quick twitch of the lips. 

“If it helps get this over with quicker,” Five says, “I have a list of what you can thank me for.” He moves on before anyone can interrupt. “Packing supplies, identifying and hot-wiring a vehicle, directing us to this safehouse, and preliminary risk calculations, which I’ll be getting back to in a moment.” He holds up a finger. “Klaus can also thank me for the resuscitation, fluids, draining a haemothorax, digging a 5.56mm bullet out of his left lung, and sutures. Also being alive.”

Klaus clearly mouths _what the fuck_ at the air behind Five’s back, then mutters “Fine,” still looking at the same spot. “Thank you _so_ much for the amateur emergency field surgery, Five,” he says. “It was uh. A lovely surprise.”

“Nothing about my competence should surprise anyone,” Five says. 

After that, the debrief goes about as well as anyone can expect. There is constant jockeying for who gets to captain the discussion, and nobody wins. There are confused questions about the details of time travel, to which Five returns non-answers. There are more complaints about the lack of basic necessities, there are announcements about mouldy blankets and suspicious scurrying noises in the roof crawlspace, there are accusations from multiple quarters that someone else is giving them a dirty look. 

Five gets up from the edge of the couch he’s perching on, dusts down his shorts. “The timelines diverged when Vanya and Allison met at Jenkins’ cottage,” he said. “I’m going to make those calculations. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight John Boy,” Klaus sing-songs after him. “Wow,” he says to the room at large, “he’s in a wonderful mood.”

“He’s being a prick,” Diego says. 

“Sarcasm, mon frère,” Klaus says, spreading a hand. 

“I really thought he’d mellowed,” Luther says. “You know, back in 2003. Guess it was a blip.”

***

Against all odds, it turns out that Luther doesn’t snore, but that was frankly the only good surprise about last night. Diego prides himself on being able to sleep anywhere he needs to, despite this being absolutely untrue. But the mattress is weird and lumpy and you can feel the springs through the butt-shaped dents. It’s freezing cold, and the threadbare blankets do shit. The scuttling noises from the attic crawlspace are more than mere rumour. Also, somewhere out there, an entire corporation of time-travelling assassins are hunting them down, and that really doesn’t help a person settle.

Diego’s in the kitchen early the next morning, munching the last protein bar and deciding that on reflection, the water out of the taps here is not okay for drinking, when it all kicks off again. 

“Why the hell didn’t you get coffee at the gas station?” Five snaps in Diego’s face, before jumping off in a flash of irritated white light to try and rifle through another cupboard for like, forty year old arabica or something. 

While Diego’s still frowning at that, Allison walks in and says, “So, there’s a bat on our bedroom ceiling. That’s fun. I need a broom. Did someone mention coffee?”

“I got what they had,” Diego calls to Five, settling back on the kitchen chair and putting his hands behind his head. He pulls a knife and flips it in his hand, turning to Allison. “I’ll go get the bat.”

“No thanks.” Allison puts a hand up. “That bed’s challenging enough without extra bat guts.”

“How can they not have coffee?” Five says, throwing up a hand. “All gas stations have coffee.”

Diego shrugs. “They were out.” He throws up his hands to ward off Five’s glare. “I swear.” 

“Five,” says Luther, hunched over his third peanut-butter sandwich, “give it up. We’re going to Walmart.”  


***

If you’d asked Vanya—the Vanya of six months ago, five years ago, ten years—what it would be like to get a week’s worth of groceries and household necessities at a rural Walmart with Diego and Five, then this is exactly what she would have imagined.

“Diego,” she says, touching his arm as he goes to get out the van. “Knives.”

“All set,” he says, gesturing at his ludicrous chest harness, “as ever.”

Oh, wow. “No. I mean, you’re wearing the harness, weapons belt, thing.” Diego looks at her blankly. “We’re going to the store. Don’t you think people might be kind of—alarmed?”

“Ah, no,” says Diego, waving a hand. “This is fine, I wear it all the time.”

“What, like to the _bodega_?”

Diego shrugs. “It’s a rough neighbourhood.”

“So’s mine! Look, how rough does it gotta be?” She takes a breath. “Okay, so we are … undercover, and we’re being discreet, right? So why don’t you just take that off—” She makes a hesitant pass for the harness, and Diego ducks back. 

“I’m not going in there unarmed,” Diego says, sounding scandalised. “Listen, Vanya, you’re a civilian. Just—leave this to us, don’t worry about it. Five’s carrying too.”

Vanya turns. “You are?” Five isn’t in the van. She and Diego both look around. Nope, he’s by the store entrance, tapping his wrist, giving them a passive-aggressive grin. 

“Could you … just put a knife in your pocket?” Vanya tries. 

“ _A_ knife?”

“Well, how many do you usually need for a grocery run?”

Five makes a hurry-it-up gesture at them with one hand. Diego rolls his eyes and then, to Vanya’s great shock, actually unbuckles the chest harness, then the thigh harnesses, and shoves them under the front seat. 

“But I’m keeping the spare under my shirt and the other one in my boot heel, okay?” he says. Vanya blinks. “Just want you to know you’ve got protection.”

“Thanks,” Vanya says feeling a little weak. “But we’re going to Walmart for underwear and towels and rice and beans. It’s not a hostage situation. Could we maybe focus on just, you know, getting our groceries without being conspicuous?”

“Hi,” says Five, ten minutes later, leaning up on the ammo counter. “Where do you keep the assault rifles?”

The lady behind the counter jitters her eyes between the thirteen year old boy and the possibly slightly stressed twenty-nine year old woman standing behind him. Vanya tries for a reassuring smile: _this is normal, just a couple of ordinary joes doing normal people stuff, normally_. She’s not sure it comes off that well. 

The lady smiles at Vanya and says, _sotto voce_ , “Walmart policy is now that we no longer stock actual firearms. Except in Alaska. I think your son might want the outdoor toy section. Just right round the corner at L13. We just got the new Nerf Blaster models in stock. He’ll like ‘em.”

Five sucks in a preparatory breath and opens his mouth—but Vanya moves quick enough to toe Five discreetly in the shin before he can talk. Nice to know she’s still got that skill in the old muscle memory. There’s a pause, while Five works on repressing whatever comeback it was. “All righty,” he says, with a big, false grin. “I’m also gonna need a bump stock for an AR-15.”

The lady looks at Vanya, slightly at a loss. Vanya smiles gamely. “Do you have … that?”

“Oh, no, ma’am. Those are actually banned by federal law, so.”

“Oh,” Vanya says. She tries a smile. “Who knew. Never mind.”

Five sighs theatrically and rubs the furrow between his eyebrows. “Okay! Well, are you able to sell us some of the ammunition I can see very clearly in that cabinet right behind you?”

“Are you under twenty-one, young man?” the store clerk says, and winks at Vanya. 

“Weekend family hunting trip!” Vanya blurts before Five can open his big mouth. “It’s … my son here–just really loves the great outdoors.” Oh god. She just wants to sink into the linoleum. This is exactly how she nearly flunked Introduction to Performing Arts in freshman year. Scripted was bad enough, improv made her crave the sweet release of death. Improv with her brother in the ammunition section of Walmart while on the lam, however, is essentially its own circle of hell. Why did she volunteer for groceries? She could have been doing the fun stuff, like keeping a lookout for assassins, or trying to poke that bat on the bedroom ceiling out the window with a broom.

But she had to decide that the best way she could be useful was to join the road trip to the nearest Walmart. Five announced the risk assessed and acceptable, then pulled up a couple floorboards in the living room to disclose more bundles of cash than Vanya had ever seen in her life. Two hours there, two hours back—and doesn’t that hammer home how far in the sticks they are—and in between, loading up with Luther’s admirably thorough supply list. Diego and Five spent most of the trip annotating, critiquing and adding to the list, because their three-way pissing contest is apparently just as important as it was when they were all twelve. When they arrived, she was thoroughly ready with the suggestion that they take different parts of the list and split up, hopefully to shop in relative discretion and peace. She then, of course, promptly had to chaperone Five while he bought priority number one, which is apparently munitions. 

“So, bullets have explosives in them, right?” Vanya asks Five, several excruciating minutes later. “If you drop them on the floor, do they go off or something?” She gingerly rearranges the ammo boxes in the cart so they jiggle around less. She’s hardly an expert, but to her, five economy-sized looking boxes of hollow point .45 acp cartridges (what even are those? Extra deadly handgun bullets?), not to mention the rest of it, probably look a little too Die Hard for shooting squirrel. 

“No, they only do that in Bugs Bunny,” says Five, wrinkling his nose. He sighs. “I really thought this time round I could persuade Dad to let you join gun defence training.”

“Since when does he ever listen to any of us?” Vanya says. “When did he,” she corrects. God, time travel. For a while there, for five deeply uncomfortable months of reliving her childhood, Dad was present tense again. Five months of going through the motions of being who they all were, sneaking out at night to scheme and practice and try and remember who they were. But the most uncomfortable part of all, somehow, was seeing Dad again and feeling absolutely nothing. Yeah, it was Dad, and sixteen years of extra perspective only made it more crystal clear what an asshole he was. But she remembers how she used to want his attention so badly. She must have felt something then. And now, she felt like she ought to have at least some kind of mourning or regret. Despite everything he did to them, the others had all felt at least something at the reunion, she was sure of it. It was the human thing to feel. That she doesn’t: it makes her wonder if there’s just something wrong with her. 

After all, she’s a murderer, isn’t she, several times over. 

She murdered Pogo, horribly, and felt nothing but a freezing rage and a relief at satisfying it. She burned down her house, she destroyed Grace in the process, nearly murdered her brothers, and the whole time, she barely felt anything but that horrible strength and cold exhilaration. She slashed Allison’s throat. One moment where she lost it, one fraction of a second of anger and panic, and she did that. 

It’s monstrous; the work of a monster. Dad, even Dad, never did anything so awful. And it’s all undone now, thank god, thank god they could take it back, that she has a second chance to be human: but still, she _knows_. She’s not undone, or innocent. She’s still capable of that, and she has to keep remembering, has to watch herself every moment, hold herself in. She killed people yesterday. Yeah, she saved her family’s lives. Yeah, it was kill or be killed. But at the moment she did it, Vanya knows she felt absolutely nothing. 

“It’s okay,” Five says, patting her arm. “I’ll show you some firearms basics tomorrow. You’ll be handling a gun in no time.”

Vanya briefly considers saying _I’d rather eat a cockroach sandwich_. Then she considers saying _I_ am _a gun, isn’t it kind of redundant?_ Then she says, limply, “Thanks, Five.” And, in case that sounds insincere, “That’d be nice.”  


***

They’ve been gone all day.

Luther and Allison have been off poking at the cabin and fixing and organising and chasing off several bats out of several rooms, which Klaus knows about because there was loud commentary throughout. He kind of really wanted to see that, but he’s absolutely not doing stairs today. His stitches pull when he moves, everything makes him out of breath, and Advil is bullshit. So, he has zip to do. 

Ben’s around, of course, but he has never been big on providing free entertainment to the underemployed masses (aka Klaus). Besides, there's kind of an atmosphere between them today. At first, Klaus had assumed that Ben was just pissed at him for taking a stupid risk, as per usual. But when he said something along those lines, Ben just gave him a hard stare and said, in ominous tones, “it's not all about you, Klaus.” Ouch. Ben’s been sulking ever since. 

Although, sulking probably isn't the right word for what you do after you get a five month time-travel induced reprieve from death, adjust to it all and surprise your siblings with the fact that death turned you into a blunt, sarcastic jerk, do your best to learn from what got you killed first time out, and then arrive back in good old 2019 to find that your efforts were pointless and death got you exactly the same anyway. 

Ben’s always said he hated feeling trapped. 

That said, Klaus isn't sure why any of this is his fault, specifically. They'd had five minutes of Ben pretending he was cool with it all before they were suddenly in a major firefight, and then Klaus got shot, and then, one way or another, he was mostly out of it until this morning, by which time Ben was clearly pissed at him. 

Now Ben is off wherever, maybe haunting the squirrels in the attic, and Klaus has no one to vent at and nothing to occupy him other than taking uncomfortable naps, being in pain, and letting his mind run to the various unpleasant places it likes to go when left unsupervised. The three of those have a way of merging. Sometime in the late afternoon, he flails himself right off the couch in the middle of a truly stellar nightmare that managed to combine snakes, that fucking disaster with the sapper attack in the 2am fog, gas masks and the freaking wolf-man. 

“Are you okay?” Luther calls from somewhere upstairs, probably having heard the thump and the scream and the volley of cursing.

“Peachy,” Klaus calls back, and then decides his lung would like him to do no more yelling. 

That's it, anyway. He's getting up. Time to take a walk. 

It probably isn't time yet, and this is frankly barely walking. He inches round the ground floor of the cabin, exploring, in search of a musty book or a pack of cards, checking idly as he goes that Diego did a thorough job of removing all intoxicants from the premises, just for the purposes of reassurance. 

After half an hour—when he’s blindly rooting in the back of the cupboard under the stairs in case of secret whisky stash, cursing under his breath while Ben, who has finally shown his face, makes passive-aggressive noises just behind him—he admits to himself that the search is not particularly idle. 

“Fine!” Klaus yells to nobody in particular, throwing his hands in the air. “Fucking fine!” He pulls his stitches hard and catches his hand on the ceiling, both at the same time. He doubles over, wincing, and stumbles backwards out of the cupboard, retreats to the couch to breathe it out. 

Ben sighs, gives Klaus a weary thumbs up, and lopes off out onto the deck, fishing a book out of his inside pocket as he goes. 

Eyes half-closed, Klaus looks around for lurking spirits. Well, if they’re here, they don’t want to be found. And that suits him just fine. He’s too exhausted right now for needy ghosts. Now there is just the creak of the wood in the breeze, the slow tiring pulse of the ache in his side, the branches outside rustling. The call of one owl, persistent: _Hey, you still up? Me too._ Good luck with the booty call, friend, Klaus thinks. _You still up? Me too._

Klaus is walking around the cabin barefoot, and it’s night now. There’s a hammock swinging gently on the porch and it wasn’t there before. From inside, a record starts playing: a soft, percussive jazz piece. Klaus steps inside, feeling slow and strange. His side doesn’t hurt, he registers. He touches it, lifts his shirt. The wound is gone. Ah. He must be dreaming. The lights are low in the living room. The red fringed lampshades on the wall lights are new too. They give the wooden walls a deep glow that’s a nice mid-way between warm and creepy. 

Someone is smoking in the high-backed chair by the fireplace, smoking and muttering. The chair was over in the corner before. Looking round at all the super spooky atmosphere that's been added to this place, Klaus starts to wonder if whoever it is lugged it over to the fire, back facing the door, for the purpose of maximising drama.

“Hi,” Klaus says, padding over to the chair. “So this is all extremely Twin Peaks. I mean, kind of derivative, but much nicer aesthetic than my last dream, so two thumbs up. Are you gonna do a little dance?”

“No,” says the man in the chair. Klaus leans in. 

Half the man’s face is gone. 

Klaus really, truly should have seen that one coming, but he still jumps and stifles a yell.

“So,” Klaus says, feeling fucking weary, “I'm having a lucid dream. That's new. And you, presumably, died here.” 

“I did indeed,” says the man, in a thick New Jersey accent. “How can ya tell?” He spreads his hands and laughs at his own joke.

Klaus sighs. “You know you guys all make the same three unfunny dead jokes, right? And you all think you're original.”

“It's the delivery,” the man says, unfazed. “Mikey DeCarlo,” he says, putting out a big meaty hand for a shake. He’s somewhere in his forties, hair over his collar and sideburns, wearing some kind of olive green polyester leisure suit with long pointed cream shirt lapels arranged over the top. You could practically carbon date him. Also, he's the most obvious mobster Klaus has ever laid eyes on. Klaus sincerely hopes he's going to call himself a legitimate businessman and maybe also say _capisce_.

“Klaus,” Klaus says, as he gets the bones of his hand crushed by the handshake of pointless machismo. “So what's worse, death or living in New Jersey?”

“Now who's unoriginal?” Mikey says easily. 

“Okay,” Klaus says, flopping onto the chair on the other side of the fireplace and throwing his legs over one arm. “I'm tired and I've got a gunshot wound. Thanks for not just screaming in my face, but can we please keep this moving? What do you want?”

“You called me,” Mikey says. He gestures around him. “I like what you did with the place, it was kind of a dump before.”

“No kidding,” Klaus says. Great, so it seems the dramatic bitch in charge of the home decor makeover was Klaus' own brain: chalk him up as disappointed but not surprised. “I wasn't trying to conjure you, I swear. Do you want to bring anything up? Because if not, I'm going to go try to conjure up some trail mix and a TV.” 

“All right,” says Mikey. “Now that I'm here, there kind of has been something on my conscience.” He leans forward. “I've been watching you guys, okay? And I know you’re some half-assed young turks or somesuch.” Klaus opens his mouth and the ghost talks over him. “Doesn't matter. Whatever racket you screwed up, bank job, professional disagreement, the fact is, you brought a kid here, and that's just a red line for me. Ya know?”

“I'm not sure I do,” Klaus says. “Look, trust me, you don't have to worry that we’re … mistreating him. It's complicated, and he's … well, he’s fine, honestly.”

“No, no,” Mikey says. “You’re misunderstanding me. I'm not talking about you schmoes. This place ain't safe. For any of youse, but. You guys, you made your own beds, but the kid, I just wouldn't feel good if something happened to him. You need to get that boy out of here before _he_ comes back.”

“Who’s he?” Klaus says. He has an aggravating sense that this is exactly what Mikey was hoping he’d say. 

Mikey shakes his head and takes a long, significant drag on his cigarette. Some of the smoke sort of floats out the ruined side of his nose. “Guy who did me. But you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” 

“Okay,” Klaus says, leaning back. “Let's see. You’re sitting in a nice fireside chair enjoying a cigarette while you're dead with half your brain pan missing, inside a dream, delivering vague warnings to a guy who talks to ghosts.” He wrinkles his nose, tilts a hand. “Given the circs, why don't you just get all of it off your chest? You'll feel better.”

Mikey leans forward, lowering his voice. “He’s a time traveller, I know that much.” Klaus uh-huhs. “And he’s merciless. Just stone-cold.” The man shakes his head. “Listen, I wasn’t exactly a nun, but this guy’s real bad news. I mean it, you gotta get that kid out of here before he gets back.”

“So … he’s an old guy?” Klaus tries to remember the face he briefly saw shoving through that time portal before it smoothed itself into baby Five’s. “White hair, moustache, suit. Loves to talk, mostly about how smart he is?” That part can't have changed much. “Five, That's his name, right?” 

“He didn't give me a name. We weren't exactly doing polite small talk, ya know?” Mikey gestures at the missing chunk of his head. “But yeah. That’s the one.”

Well, what this conversation lacks in useful intel it certainly gains in shit-talking potential. Klaus starts road-testing gags in his head. _Five, Five, who will save you from yourself?_ Too obvious?

Mikey has one judgy eye turned on him. Ghosts usually want something bad, and often enough it's just to tell someone their story. Klaus should be a better audience, if only so this dude doesn't show up at his bedside at 3am to do some more oversharing. 

“How do you know he’s coming back?” Klaus says. “From the look of that leisure suit, it's been a while. He might be long gone.”

“Because I saw him in a corner of this room last night,” Mikey says.

Klaus’ stomach flips right over. That, right there, is over the line into campfire story territory. 

“Yeah,” says Mikey. “Sitting right there, looking at you, mister.” He points to the chair in the corner. “Looking at all of youse while you ate up your noodles.”

Klaus sighs, relieved. Can’t be Five. Just another ghost, then. “Well, if the guy who iced you is here but no one can see him, that would make him also dead. So. I'm sure it's kind of socially awkward but trust me, he can't hurt the living. The most he can do is annoy you and me. Capisce?” 

Mikey shakes his head. “This guy wasn't dead. Trust me. He wasn't there like you were there, though. I figured it was more of that spooky disappearing act shit he does.”

This is giving Klaus a headache now. They're supposedly being haunted, according to some gangster Five murdered here in like 1974, by some other time-travelling projection of Five? That's going to go over just great at the family meeting tomorrow morning.

“Definitely the same guy?” Klaus asks weakly, hoping one last time to be freed from reporting this ridiculous story. 

“Definitely,” says Mikey, nodding his half a head. “He had a mask on this time, but I knew it was him.”

Klaus flops his head back over the arm of the chair, rolls his eyes up at the ceiling, takes a nice long exhale. “You could have led with that, you know. But, here we are now. I listened to your whole drama, so I’ll bite.” He lifts up his head, pouts out a lip. “If he had a mask on, y’know, how do you absolutely _know_ —?”

“How'd I know it was the same guy? Ha,” Mikey says. Well, at least he's got self-awareness. He leans in. “The eyes, man. There was no mercy in his eyes. Like he wasn't even human. Like something wild. You’ll see. I hope you don’t see.”

“Oh? What was the mask like?” Klaus asks. He's now pretty sure it wasn't Five at all, but despite the whiff of tall tale about this, he's no longer quite so relieved.

The man’s one eye stares Klaus out. It strikes Klaus very uncomfortably that behind all the theatrics and the Goodfellas posturing, this guy is actually frightened. “It was the face of a wolf.” 

***

Diego removes two bottles of whiskey and one of vodka and puts them on the highest shelf in the aisle. Yeah, Five can just poof up there, but Diego is making a point, and the point is that Five is really fucking short.

The supply run is not going so well. 

Five and he have had the conversation about why they aren’t buying liquor five times already, and it’s ended every time with a variation of Five saying, “Klaus is an adult and I’m not doing this field trip without whiskey”, stalking off, and returning with more booze. Which Diego then dumps. And so it goes. 

Then there was the cereal aisle incident. Five spent ten full minutes exploring the Cap’n Crunch and Chocolate Lucky Charms and Fruity Pebbles with care and wonder, as if he’d just opened King Tut’s tomb or something. Apparently, there weren’t any sugar-bomb breakfasts in the apocalypse, and since there weren’t any at Dad’s place in 2003 either, cereal has apparently moved to the top of the priority list. 

Vanya has long abandoned the two of them to fly solo, which was probably a wise move, because Five can be trusted in this store way less than an average actual thirteen year old. 

Diego turns back to the cart and realises that as ever, he shouldn’t have turned away. Five is sitting in it, with an unpurchased, scribble-covered notebook on one knee and his free hand in an open, unpurchased box of Trix. “What the hell, Five?” he says. It’s not the first time he’s said that in the last five minutes. 

“Just thought of something,” Five mutters, not looking up. “Two minutes.”

“You know, it’s technically shoplifting if you didn’t check it out first,” Diego says. 

“Inconsequential,” Five says to his notebook. 

“Fine,” Diego says, turning from the cart. “Fine. I’m not pushing you, get out and walk.”

“Telling, you, that’s not the targets,” someone says. 

Something pings Diego’s internal alarm system. He looks around, and sees them immediately. 

Two people are standing at the end of the aisle. Neither of them have been listening to Vanya about the Walmart dress code. They’ve got the gas masks, the suits, the semiautomatics, the whole deal. 

“See,” one of them says, pointing to a photo the other one’s holding. “No, wait.”

“Shit,” Diego says. “ _Five!_ ” His hands move automatically to draw a knife from each thigh holster and—no. No thigh holsters, no chest holster, shit shit shit, and before he’s even thought about it he’s got a tennis ball in each hand and is slinging them at the two mooks at mach fuck. He bops them both on the nose and they stagger but don’t go down, so he gets them another couple of times, while they shield their faces and yell. 

“What?” he hears Five say. “Oh. _Shit._ ”

“Thanks for joining us,” Diego yells, shoving the cart round the corner then skidding round himself.

“Vanya!” Five yells. “Where is she? We need to get to her.”

“I don’t know!” Diego says, covering his head as they duck and sprint. 

“I'll check outdoor supplies, you go for groceries!” Five says, then he's parting the air like a rippling curtain and he's gone. 

Diego carries on sprinting, head down, using what cover there is as best he can. The Commission guys seem to be spread out but damn, there's a lot of them, and soon he's drawing fire as he goes, piles of cans rattling and rails of clothes peppered with holes. He's aware of that usual general background noise of screaming and running, civilians doing what they do best and booking it out of there. God, he hopes no one’s gonna try to be a hero, that's all they need.

There's no sign of Vanya so far as he picks his way carefully between the grocery aisles. They don't have a bead on him right now, but this isn't good. Vanya’s powers don't have a low volume setting. If the windstorm isn't whipping up and the property damage hasn't started, she’s not the White Violin, she’s just his little civilian sister hiding behind the pasta aisle. (It’s a useful distinction, and it’s not Diego’s fault she doesn’t like the sick codename they gave her. Anyway, beats having to explain what the hell a kraken was every time.)

He’s just darting across the open space of the snack aisle when out of nowhere—not fucking again—he’s in the air. The goddamn sonic clothes iron Vanya gun. He grabs at nothing, spins and kicks in mid-air, while a couple of mooks stare up at him. “Yeah!” one of them yells, “check it!” 

“Quit showing off,” the other mook says, and then there’s a sudden high-pitched noise and a horrible, painful vibration in his eardrums, and he slams into the ground. 

It’s not a good landing by any means, but Diego manages to get his arms over his head and his knees bent and he ends up curled on his side. He rolls onto his back and goes for a kip up, but as he’s flipping up the world just spins around him and he lands dizzily on hands and knees. So his balance is screwed too. Fantastic. Diego blinks. He’s seeing double, like a damn cartoon, he can’t focus his eyes. He scrambles up—and the whole aisle is too tall, oh no, wait, it’s up high in the air, shimmering—and then it just throws itself down on top of him. 

He goes down hard on his left shoulder and grunts as the weight of the whole grocery aisle smashes down on top of him. Then he’s moving immediately—or trying to. His arms are pinned, his left trapped under his body and his right caught under a tangle of metal. He grits his teeth hard and tries to yank his right arm free. Get to the knife under his shirt, get to basically anything he could throw. It doesn’t work. Who knew Walmart grocery shelves were this freaking heavy, it’s like being under a concrete slab. 

“Jesus, Frank,” says someone. “You want to get us written up? We’re not supposed to play around with this weapon, direct usage on the target only.”

“That is one of the targets! And he’s on the ground, isn’t he?” says the mook who’s apparently Frank. “And it was practically direct, the grocery shelves just happened to get in the way.”

“Just put him down already,” says the other mook. “And no screwing around, you got our pay docked this month already.” 

Footsteps tap up to Diego. So this is how he goes out, huh? Double-tapped by some weirdo in a gas mask while trapped under the Oreo aisle of a rural Walmart. It’s got dignity, he’ll give it that. 

He looks up, hoping to feel weary and stoic but finding, immediately, that he actually feels a reasonable amount of terror. Sure enough, Frank the goon is right there, pointing a pistol right at his face. Diego considers a final gracenote of badassery, like maybe spitting at him, or saying something cool that he absolutely can’t think up right now. 

Will he be a ghost? Will he have to watch them kill his whole family?

His throat has closed up anyway. He settles for jerking his chin up and looking the asshole in the eye. The goon is slipping his finger onto the trigger already. _Keep your eyes open, keep looking at him_ , he thinks, and wills it to be over before his nerve cracks—

—His eardrums pop and Frank skids backwards across the floor like he’s a fucking ice hockey puck, blown by a shimmering humming wall of vibration. 

The cage of metal pinning Diego to the floor vaults high into the air, shimmering too, and the weight is off of him and he’s free. 

Diego gets his numbed feet under him, scrambles upright. 

Vanya, his tiny litle sister Vanya, is standing in the aisle ahead in her baggy sweater that’s still stained white from the last fight, her hair waving around her, one arm raised above her like an orchestra conductor. She’s holding three aisles of shelves and canned goods high above them, like it’s simple, like it’s nothing. Diego looks above him stupidly for a moment, at the cans and metal and packets of Lemon Oreo Thins dancing in thin air. Then he gets behind her. 

The gas mask goons are firing at a shimmering barrier in the air. She’s bulletproof too now? Goddamn. Vanya makes a grand, precise gesture—one arm flicks out as if to throw a stone, the other hand makes a brushing gesture of dismissal—and the barrier fades and ripples into air and the tons of debris in the air vault down, with force, on the guys with the masks. 

They’re buried. Dust, or possibly flour, settles. 

Vanya makes a little gasping noise in her throat, excited or scared. 

Diego pats her on the shoulder. “Nice,” he says. “Real nice.”

Vanya looks up at him over her shoulder, her eyes that shocking white, and gives him a goofy, sincere little smile.

“Five’s looking for you,” Diego says. 

“Good to know I’ve got protection,” Vanya says, and though Diego feels kind of needled, he’s got to give her props for a solid burn. 

A moment later, Five glitches into presence right inside the bubble of their barrier. “Saw the smoke,” he says to her. “Figured it was you.”

“Smoke?” says Diego. 

“Yeah,” he says, “the ceiling’s hit in a few spots. Little structural damage, little fire—”

“Oh,” Vanya says, looking up. She raises one hand. There’s a screeching sound, and then the bits of crap stop raining down and seem to hang suspended by the ceiling. 

“I don’t think I did that,” she says. “Did I?”

“They got that sonic thing,” Diego says, “the clothes iron?”

Vanya looks, for a moment, awkward and uncertain. “Maybe they did it?” she says. It’s odd seeing that cold regal stare of the White Violin momentarily give way to a hesitant Vanya frown. 

“Whichever. Let’s get out of here,” Five says. 

Vanya nods. Her rippling sonic barrier moves with them now as they stride through the rubble-strewn aisles, shoulder to shoulder. The barrier just seems to absorb bullets like water and drop them to the ground, and ever so often Vanya flicks out a wrist and throws a bunch of mooks at the nearest wall. 

The sonic waves keep hitting the ceiling. Maybe the Commission got the ceiling first, but if the building wasn’t already coming down, it would be now. Never mind. Nobody here but Commission mooks and them. Diego is totally fine with power-walking their way out of there and then letting the building drop. 

They’re close to the entrance when Five yells “Vanya, on your three!”

“What? Which way’s three?” Vanya says, looking around her in confusion. Five just catches her jaw and turns her head to three o’ clock. There’s a mook with a sonic Vanya gun standing right there, and it’s making that humming power-up noise. Vanya flicks out a hand at them—and instead, the gun’s sonic wave punches a hole straight through her barrier and a whoosh of air hits the three of them. 

It occurs to Diego that, yeah, that’s probably what the Vanya gun is actually for. 

The barrier bursts totally open now, like water flooding when someone throws something solid at it. Then all three of them are in the air for a moment, jerking and gasping under the pull of something that feels like it’s sucking the air out of their lungs. Then next to him, Vanya just switches off like someone pulled her plug. Her eyes flicker to brown, that vague glow around her snaps off, the remnants of the barrier shimmer away—and they all drop like stones. 

Diego manages to break his own fall this time. He gets an arm around Vanya’s shoulders. She’s conscious, groaning under her breath. He gets her up. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Five scrambling to his feet too. They’re surrounded, covered from every angle by mooks holding guns. Just for fun, the mooks have all turned on the laser sights so they can all see how many dots of red light are dancing on their torsos, check out how truly fucked they are. 

There’s a cracking sound from above, unbearably loud, and dust rains down on their heads. The sound gets worse and the floor reverberates. Oh yeah, he thinks. Vanya’s force field was holding the roof up—but not any more. 

Well, shit—


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once more [Majure](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Majure/pseuds/Majure) saved my butt with a super-speedy beta job and a ton of suggestions/encouragement. Go read their amazing Klaus/Dave chapterfic [Ten Months](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18214736/chapters/43091279) if you like reading about dumbasses in love.

“Nearly eight o’ clock,” Luther says, checking his watch and peering out into the darkening woods. 

“Yup.” Allison readjusts the fold of her arms, leans into the wall of the back porch. 

“They’re taking too long, though. Two hours to that Walmart, two hours back …”

“Infinity time to argue over groceries?” Allison quirks an eyebrow at him. 

Luther smiles and looks up from his perch, hunched over on the sturdier of the porch’s two grubby plastic lawn chairs. “Sounds about right. You’re right, they’re probably fine.” He pauses, shakes his head. “They _really_ should have called in. The phone’s working, I checked it again.”

Allison tries to get another grin out of him. “Are you _fretting_?”

He ducks his head a bit, chuckles. “Maybe. Yeah. You?”

Allison sighs. “A little.” She shakes her head. “Actually … I keep thinking about what time it is LA time. I know that’s ridiculous. Claire’s safe, and … I am worried. About the others, about all of us …”

“It’d be, what?” Luther says. “Five o'clock there right now?”

“Yup,” Allison says. “She’ll be finishing up her dinner … probably arguing for dessert.” The corners of her mouth turn up, despite herself. “Then of course at six she’ll be pushing for that one more cartoon before bathtime.”

Luther grins. “Sounds like a kid who knows what she wants.”

“Always.” Allison looks off into the trees, and smiles, and aches. “Ever since the day she was born.”

“Can’t imagine where she gets it from.”

Allison chuckles, and shakes her head, and feels worse. She has now missed four court-ordered couples’ therapy sessions. After Dad’s funeral, Patrick made it pretty clear how he was going to proceed, him and his sleazy-ass Hollywood power lawyer, if she missed even two. 

She can’t even call. Not without potentially giving them away. Who knows if the Commission are keeping tabs on Patrick and Claire. That’d be smart. The thought makes her nauseous. 

She looks off to one side. Subject change. “Hey,” she says. “You know what this mess reminds me of? You remember those awful wilderness survival camping trips Dad used to send us on?”

“I liked ‘em,” Luther says. Then he shakes his head. “No, you know what, I didn’t. I liked the idea of them, but they always turned out so horrible.”

Dad would drive them up to the mountains in his old jeep, drop them off with maps and compass and packs which generally contained plentiful supplies of knives and rope but nothing so pantywaist as an actual tent. 

“Remember that time he just handed me those dead rabbits out of the jeep window?” Allison said. “It was like this was some huge concession and I was supposed to be thrilled.”

“Wilderness survival starter pack,” Luther says. “Just add … teenagers who can’t cook, and knives, and god that was just completely disgusting.”

Allison pulls a face. “I know, and the more of us who got involved, the worse it was.”

“We were _so_ hungry.” 

“And then next time it was just … everyone snuck ramen into their packs.” 

Luther grins at her. “Probably the most unanimous the team’s ever been.”

They’re both laughing now, and a little lighter. 

“Except for Vanya,” Allison says. She shakes her head. “I tried to tell her at the time, but, y’know.”

“Well,” Luther says, “I guess now she gets to find out how much fun she missed.”

“Yeah,” Allison says, but she can feel the mood drifting into worry again. Vanya, Five and Diego have been gone so, so long. There’s no denying it now, and it just gets more obviously cause for concern as the minutes crawl by. 

Luther stands. “We should set a watch,” he says. “I’ll take the first one. If we divide it into two hour stretches, between five of us, that should work.”

“Good idea,” Allison says. It is. Also, Luther needs to pace, and fret, and feel like he’s doing something semi-useful. “I’ll go check on Klaus,” she says. 

She pats his arm and goes in. On the couch, Klaus is still fast asleep. He’s lying on his good side, legs curled up, too long for the couch. She paces the living room quietly in her stockinged feet. She always feels so short without heels, kind of undressed. She used to joke about them being her armour. 

Those camping trips really were that bad. God. She promised herself, when she left, never again would she go near any kind of wilderness survival experience. Now look at her. 

That time Diego, Luther and Five had a two hour screaming match in the rain about the right way to build a bivouac shelter? Probably the rock bottom of the whole thing, marginally beating out Rabbit-gate. After hour one of yelling over how to stack branches and drape tarp, she’d noped out of being the voice of reason and gone to join Klaus and Ben in the refusenik corner by a big pine trunk. They’d all huddled under a smuggled umbrella and passed around a single cigarette and tried to pretend the whole thing wasn’t happening. 

Thirteen is way too young, in retrospect, to be smoking, but, well: they were too young for a hell of a lot of things. 

Allison stops pacing, looks over at Klaus on the couch. He’s breathing slow and soft, that nasty wheeze has nearly gone and there’s a little colour in his cheeks. She picks up a blanket from the side of the couch, sniffs it (dusty but acceptable) and spreads it over him. Bless him for that umbrella and that cigarette sixteen years ago. He always had that instinct for just the right small kindness at the right moment. 

It's been six and a half months since Allison saw Claire face to face—or at least that's how long it's been for Claire. For Allison, thanks to time travel, it's been a year. A goddamn year without her. The way Claire scrunches her nose, her funny little turns of phrase, the way her hair smells. And she changes so fast. Allison missed last Christmas. What other moments has she missed, will she miss, that will never come again? Has Claire lost her first tooth yet? Did someone else teach her to ride a bike? What happens when she wakes after a bad dream? Is she okay? Allison might never see her again. Either the time-travelling assassins get her or the divorce lawyers, take your pick.

Allison knows full well she fucked up her own life. Ideally, she'd be attempting to unfuck it without being treated like the evil queen from a Disney movie, but if that's what she's working with, well, that's on her too, in the end.

The worst and the best thing about arriving in 2003 was the first time she looked in the mirror, seeing Claire's face looking back. Allison had cried stupidly for a full five minutes, just for the absence of her, for how they were a part of each other, yet there was no Claire in this world, not yet. And as she'd calmed, she'd realised that despite everything she did and everything she regrets, here with the chance to do it all again, she couldn't bear to change a single line of the life that led her to her daughter. 

Patrick doesn't have a shred of goodwill towards her now. That's probably fair. It doesn’t matter, in the end, if she’s innocent of half the stuff he suspects her of; he’ll always have to wonder. The idea of it dirties everything they ever had together, all the way back. 

Allison sinks into a chair. She closes her eyes, presses fingertips to her temples. And she feels so gross too. It shouldn’t matter, not with all this going on, not with the others so worryingly late and Klaus nearly dying yesterday and all of them stuck here trying to negotiate a threat she can’t even parse. But somehow, even so, it makes it all worse to feel her skin crawling and itchy with dried sweat, to be wearing yesterday’s underwear, to be hungry and cold and have a crick in her back from that mouldy lumpy mattress. Clean underwear and socks and shower soap would be a hell of a morale boost right now. 

It’s not that the others can’t look after themselves, of course. And Vanya’s control is far better than most of the others give her credit for. But she worries, she can’t not. And Luther worries too, pacing round the perimeter of the cabin. Klaus would be worrying if he was awake. She knows Ben will be around somewhere too, furrowing his brow. God, she’d be so angry, so frustrated right now if she were Ben. Back on the bench. Given a taste of life then having it ripped right out of your hands. It’s too cruel. 

She massages her temples again, sighs. And they’re running out of bottled water. She’s ready to drink that crap out of the taps that runs out brown for the first thirty seconds. Maybe they need to catch rainwater or something. God, she hated those survival weekends. Compulsory bullshit. 

The headache hits her suddenly, a sharp cold pang right between the eyes. It hops up every so often when she doesn't use her powers, but she's not doing that now, so. A glass of sketchy tapwater and some time, it’ll pass off like always. 

Luther’s moving around outside, pacing; she can hear twigs snapping. He sounds stressed. Yeah, she could use the fresh air, and the company. They can go be worrywarts together. 

The breeze is chilly as she steps onto the porch. 

Luther’s a good few yards out in the woods. She can see his shadowy figure, loping around. She frowns, peering. His figure blurs in front of her vision; her head pangs. She sucks in a breath, closes her eyes and rubs her eyelids for a moment. 

When she opens her eyes, Luther has stopped moving. He’s standing, looking in her direction. 

She raises a hand, waves. 

He lifts a hand back. 

“Whatcha doing out there?” she calls—and even as the words slip out her mouth something pangs in alarm inside her. His shoulders look wrong, and the movement—something on his head. 

“Who’re you talking to?” Luther says from behind her. 

Allison jolts. She turns, touches his arm, looks from Luther to the woods. 

The figure’s gone. Her stomach drops. 

“Allison?” Luther says. “What’s—” 

She puts a finger to his lips, shakes her head. She whispers, “I just saw someone out there. I thought it was you, but—”

“Klaus?” Luther has lowered his voice to an undertone.

“Asleep.”

“You stay with him,” Luther says. “Just in case. I’ll go check it out.” 

“It’s probably just someone out hiking,” Allison says. “Or a hunting trip. It’s not …”

Luther nods, but he’s frowning hard, looking out into the woods. “Maybe,” he says. 

Allison folds her arms. The woods look empty now. Her headache’s passed off now. Something doesn’t quite sit right with her about this. The way that—

The sound of an engine, stones crunching under wheels, fades in from the front. They look at each other and both jog for the front of the cabin, hoping, alarmed. 

It’s the van after all. Thank goodness. Vanya’s in the driving seat. The van pulls up outside the cabin, and she, Diego and Five get out. Five’s limping, Diego has a bruise swelling on the side of his cheek, and Vanya’s eyes are like saucers. All three of them are covered in dust and look strung out and exhausted. And those bullet holes in the side and back door of the van definitely weren’t there when they left. 

“Well,” Five says, “you want the good news first, or the bad news?”

***

They hit the decks.

Five and Diego instantly dive for the floor, and they push Vanya down with them. Five holds his hand over her head; Diego takes it upon himself to shield both of them with his torso. Dust rains down on them and there’s an explosion of noise: shots, yells, panic. Vanya makes a scared gritted noise, hands over her ears.

 _Try to blink out_ , Five thinks, and he starts with a good strong push straight down through the floor, taking Diego and Vanya with him. 

It’s a fool’s errand, of course—kind of like trying to tear a phonebook in half when you can’t even get the pickle jar open. The floor glitches briefly around them, then snaps right back into place. Passengers are a stretch at the best of times, and right now Five has already exhausted himself, like an idiot. 

He pokes his head up, looks around. A lot of the Commission agents are down. Well, that’s where the phrase _circular firing squad_ comes from, assholes. The surviving Commission agents appear to be evacuating. That’s certainly a plan. 

He only has to look at the doors for Diego to get it and nod. They scramble up and sprint for the door, one on each side of Vanya. After a moment she gets her feet under her and runs. Dust and bits of ceiling are raining down; a chunk of masonry lands barely behind them. The sliding doors, when they reach them, do not slide. Diego snaps out a kick at the already-shattered glass of one door, then just shoves himself through the rest, one arm over his face. Diego guides Vanya through and Five is just behind her. 

Out in the parking lot, Five can see agents, but they’re mostly running—which means that Five, Diego and Vanya get a full couple of seconds before someone spots them and calls out, and the shooting starts. Five feels something punch his right calf as they go, but his leg holds fine: file it for later. 

By the time they reach the van, back door first, they’re drawing so much fire they’d be dead by the time they got it open. The side of the van has a little more cover, and so that’s where they flatten themselves while Diego shoves the key in the lock. As the door opens Diego just picks the both of them up, one under each arm, and throws them in, head first. Five could barely give a shit about the indignity at this stage. Diego dives in after the two of them and then scrambles and rolls himself into the front seat. A window smashes and a couple of bullets dent in the walls as the van starts up. _The tyres_ , Five thinks, pressing himself and Vanya flat to the floor of the van. They’ll have shot out the tyres, shit, they’re going to get perforated in here like Bonnie and Clyde. 

The van takes off with a screech, instantly at speed. The tyres are good, at least right now. The van swerves alarmingly as they head for the lot exit. Five risks popping his head up and checking the rearview—just in time to see a large portion of the Walmart building crumple in on itself. A thick wavering plume of dark smoke rises from the building, and through it Five can see licks of flame. 

“Aw, shit,” Five hears Diego say. For a moment he thinks it’s a belated interest in the property damage; then he sees Diego blinking woozily at the steering wheel, his head nodding. They veer sharply to the right, then to the left as Diego frantically tries to correct. 

Somehow, Five finds just enough juice left in him to jump to the front seat. He hits left of Diego, shoves him over and taking the wheel. Diego doesn’t even protest, just grunts and moves over. Five spins the wheel and they pull out onto the road. 

“Fuck,” Diego says, “that gun, feel like I’m on a fricking teeter-totter. Are you good?”

“I’m fine,” Five says, feeling his leg burn and ache as he floors the accelerator. He has to lift his butt right off the seat to get to the pedals. He flicks a glance down: yeah, there’s blood. The pain’s not deep: hopefully he just got dinged. He reaches down and yanks the seat forward as far as it goes. 

“Vanya?” Five says, as they pull out onto the freeway. He can sees her in the rearview, sitting up and rubbing her face. 

“I’m okay,” she says. “I think? But I can’t, y’know. My head’s ringing. I can’t catch a note.”

“Then that’s all of us with powers down,” Diego says, patting his chest down for injuries. “Cool, cool. Hey Five, you ever consider maybe not going in so hot? You jump yourself out of gas every time, thought by now you were old enough to know better?”

Five snorts. “Story of my life,” he says, with a big tight grin. It really is. And he’s never learned. 

Diego leans in to start checking Five over; Five swats his hand away. 

“You’re bleeding, Five,” Diego says. 

“I’m _driving_ ,” Five says. “It’s fine, it’s a scratch, check Vanya.”

That sees him off. Diego turns to Vanya, and Five hears him talking her through how to pat herself down. “Feet to head, check under your arms too, that’s it, you’re good, now turn around—” 

In the rearview, Five catches the car swerving between lanes, coming up rapidly behind them. “Shit,” he mutters. “We got company.”

“Ah, crap,” Diego says, at the same time as Vanya, looking into the rearview, mutters a soft _oh my god_.

Five assesses. “Vanya,” he says. “Can you drive?”

“Of course I can, I’m a functional—oh, as in now?” 

Diego holds out an arm, and helps her scramble and slide over the back of the front bench seat. There’s some shoving as she leans in and takes the wheel. Five pulls his knees up and when his leg burns, he presses his lips together hard and huffs. 

Five ducks over the top of the front seat and scrambles into the back of the van. The car is gaining on them. The passenger window winds down. 

“Faster!” Diego yells. 

Vanya changes lanes and steps on the gas. Her eyes are very round as she turns the wheel, nearly skids and manages to correct, ducks back into the fast lane and floors it. 

Five flips over the blanket, pulls out the AR-15 he’d stashed there earlier. He tucks a spare magazine under his arm.

Someone in a Commission mask is leaning out of the car’s passenger window with an assault rifle, too far away yet but trying to draw a bead on them anyway.

“Keep going!” Five yells. “You need to buy us some time!”

“I’m trying!” Vanya yells back. “I’m used to driving a compact!” 

In the rearview, the Commission car is gaining on them again. 

“Count to ten, then let them catch up,” Five says. 

“What?” Diego says. 

“I need a clear shot from the rear!” Five says. He gets to the van’s rear doors, pulls off his tie, passes it through one of the D-rings for tying down cargo at the bottom of the van wall, then round his own waist and knots it tight. He gets his hand on the door. The van weaves, and he can see the tension in Vanya’s shoulders as she spins the steering wheel. 

“Now!” Diego yells. Five throws open the van’s rear door.

The Commission car is dead behind them, so much closer than he was expecting. They’re already firing. He’s ready, keeps the trigger squeezed, sprays them, one knee up, bracing himself against the wall. The rifle kicks hard against his too-small shoulder and the tie bites round his waist. The car’s windshield shatters. The gunman on the passenger side jerks and flops over the open window; the other one keeps firing. Five grits his teeth, expecting the hit any moment, him or the van, or—

The Commission car abruptly tilts one way then the other, tyres screeching; it swings out of control, then flips over altogether. It rolls across the lanes once, twice—several cars swerve and narrowly avoid it—and then it lands, upside down and rear in the air, in the ditch at the edge of the freeway. 

“Check it, Vanya,” Diego says, as the crashed car recedes in the rearview. “See, they don't always just, like, explode like in the movies.”

Behind them, the Commission car abruptly blooms into a fireball. 

In the silence after, Five lets himself flop back against the wall of the van. He feels utterly exhausted. He's got all this _energy_ these days, sometimes being thirteen feels like being the fricking Energiser Bunny. But the flip side is it never lasts as long as he thinks, and then he just sacks out like a puppy. 

“All that and we didn’t even get the goddamn groceries,” Five says, half-closing his eyes. 

“We got the groceries,” Vanya says. 

“What?” Five looks around and sees, only now, the rows of grocery bags stowed neatly under the other blanket. 

“Actually got most of the list,” Vanya says. Five can see the little grin on her face through the rearview. “I only came back in from the lot to check if you guys had murdered each other.”

“All right!” Diego pats her shoulder. “Today's MVP.”

“Yeah,” Vanya adds. Confidence has crept into her voice; she's smiling slightly, sitting up a little taller. “By the way, you know what Allison said about volunteering for the grocery trip? Watch it, or they’ll have you doing it every time.”

“We all pull our weight,” Diego says, puffing up a bit. “I did dishes.”

“Well,” Vanya says, “next time, someone else can buy peanut butter and drop masonry on assassins.”

“Yeah,” Diego says, “I don't think there's gonna be a next time at that Walmart.” 

Five is starving, he realises. That's the other thing about thirteen. “Hey,” he says, “you get any Cap’n Crunch?”

Vanya, possibly the sassiest he's ever seen her, just catches his eye in the rearview and raises an eyebrow.

***

So, the rest of the evening is interesting.

Diego paces while Five and Vanya flop on either end of a couch, like tired, violent little bookends, eating ready-grated cheddar out of a bag. The three of them all take turns interrupting each other while they tell a tale that ends with the Walmart partially collapsed and on fire, everyone’s powers down, and a car full of Commission agents exploding on the freeway. Luther perches on the edge of a rickety high-backed armchair to listen, because he’s pretty sure that if he leans back, his shoulders are going to get stuck. Klaus rouses himself from the other couch a few minutes in, mutters something random to Ben or to the air about Twin Peaks and a wolf mask, then polishes off the rest of the grated cheese. 

Five blinks out of the room halfway through an explanation of how the weird sonic gun zaps Vanya’s powers, and returns, mid-sentence, with a jar of Nutella and two spoons. Five minutes later, Vanya falls asleep right there on the couch with the jar in her hand. Klaus hauls himself up to put his blanket over her, then steals the rest of the jar. 

On the one hand, they now all have warm clothes and clean underwear and a week’s supply of food and sundries. On the other hand, they got made by the time-travelling assassins in record time. On the third hand, if you had one, Five claims airily that it will take “several days” by standard Commission protocols to sweep the area and find them. “More calculations forthcoming”, whatever that means.

Nothing can ever be simple, can it?

Afterwards, Allison, Diego and Luther sweep the dark woods around the cabin, checking for any signs of Allison’s mystery man. No dice. That’s good. Possibly.

They set a watch. Luther manages to wake in the night two hours before he’s due to take his turn, and then of course he can’t get back to sleep. He spends a fun couple hours listening to squirrels running round the crawlspace, coyotes or foxes yelping and howling in the night. His brain takes the opportunity to ruminate about various cheering subjects: like the apocalypse, or how Vanya going nuclear the first time round was pretty much entirely Luther’s fault and if she never trusts him again, that’s fair. Fun stuff like how Grace and Pogo are holed up somewhere in the Academy right now, waiting for them to come back, and, if the time-travelling assassins get their way, they might never come back at all. Or how on their trip back to 2003, Ben got obsessed with microwave popcorn and they would sit in the kitchen sometimes, late at night, talking and sometimes Ben would get this glow on him, this little bounce of sheer delight like he was so glad to be alive he couldn’t even be cool about it. Fun stuff like how Luther started noticing, that trip, how the moment anyone got too confident in training, or too smart with him, Dad would know the exact thing to say to burst that person’s bubble, and then he’d come right in with _if you want to correct these flaws, and it is vital you do so, then you must train harder, you must follow orders without complaint …_ Breathtakingly calculated, like the way he taught them to fight with fists and knives: this spot will render them unconscious in five seconds, a blow here to take them to the ground but keep them awake, a stab to the armpit can sever the axillary artery. 

_I don’t want to turn into Dad_ , he’d said to Ben, one two a.m. at the kitchen table. _You won’t_ , Ben said. _You’re not smart enough to be that much of a devious asshole._ And Luther laughed and threw a piece of popcorn at him, and Ben said, suddenly sincere, _you’re better than that. Just be you_. 

_Just be you_ is easier said than done when you don’t really know who you are any more. 

After his dawn watch, Luther’s up anyway. One by one, everyone limps in to grab breakfast. Nobody seems to have slept well. Three out of the six of them, Luther notes, are now injured. Last night Five insisted on stitching up his own bullet graze, and this morning he’s walking with a limp and denying it. And he might be ignoring that healing shrapnel wound, but Luther hasn’t forgotten it’s there. Diego is bruised and cranky and moving stiffly, and he’s visibly favouring his left arm. Klaus is, as of this morning, up and hobbling around, but he gets out of breath fast, and more to the point, he’s jittery as hell: his hands are constantly in motion, fidgeting and tapping. 

Luther was planning on calling a meeting after breakfast, but it seems to have called itself, or maybe they all for once had the same idea. Everyone’s slouching and perching and leaning on various items of furniture in the living room, everyone’s sucking on coffee, and nobody’s looking at each other. 

“So,” Luther says gamely, “now we’re all here we should probably debrief. First off—”

“Wait up,” Klaus says, holding up a finger, “wait up. We’re not all here yet.” He clasps his hands tightly and leans his chin on them. He sucks in a breath and his eyes dart over to the hearth. 

“—don’t have to do this, Klaus, you’re injured, I’ll sit it out, no big—”

The voice goes from a vague murmur to full volume right next to Luther, tuning in like a radio frequency—and there’s Ben, leaning on the fireplace. He freezes in mid-sentence, and his eyes dart around, self-conscious, like he’s been caught out.

“Ben!” Luther says. There’s a little internal burst of joy and sorrow. He looks whole, he looks twenty-nine, he looks like he should look. 

“Um,” says Ben. “Hey guys.”

Klaus exhales deeply. “There,” he says. His smile is bright and a little smug and it makes his whole face look different. “Now we’re quorate.”

***

Diego’s left shoulder is being a pain in the ass this morning. It took a lot of the impact yesterday when the Commission guys smashed him into the floor with those shelves. Lucky he didn’t reopen his stitches: the downside of getting back to 2019 and his twenty-nine year old body was getting back that bullet wound in his arm.

“You should rest that arm in a sling,” Luther says, catching him trying to butter toast one-handed. “Use one of the spare shirts.”

“Doing fine, thanks,” Diego says, picking up the plate with his left hand and trying not to wince. 

Diego’s got a big old bruise on his butt and left thigh too, and sitting down isn’t so fun. But still, he can’t exactly complain. He’s good. He can just breathe through it, enjoy his eggs and avocado and juice and the fact that yet again their luck held enough that they all got out in one piece. 

If Vanya had gotten there two seconds later, Diego’s brains would have been paste on the industrial flooring. 

The day before that, it had been Klaus nearly checking out on the infirmary operating table. Before that, it was Allison. Before that, Five had gotten himself that shrapnel wound getting away from the Commission. 

And before that it was Patch. 

In between, half a dozen firefights and ambushes and kidnappings and oh yeah, the end of the world. Rebooting Vanya saved Mom and Pogo, saved Allison’s throat, and shit, he’s so grateful for all of that and for everyone he hasn’t lost. And he’s grateful too, in a weird way, for the unending distractions of all this bullshit. But Patch still isn’t in this world any more. Her slow grins and her teasing and carefulness and decency, the neat weight of her laying on him, the way her hair smelled, how she just understood stuff when he half-said it. The world doesn’t get any more Patch, and Patch doesn’t get any more of the world. 

Diego’s used to danger, to taking hits, to close calls. Here’s what he’s not used to: feeling someone so alive and so important ripped out of his life, of her own life, and knowing in his bones that there’s more coming, and soon. This thing they’re all in now is different: it’s relentless, it’s intense, it’s more shit every damn day. It’s a whole-ass army coming after their hides. When they get lucky now, it’s starting to feel like less of an occasion for gratitude, more of an ominous warning sign from the universe. 

Despite it all, though, a strong coffee and a good breakfast, after a day that could have gotten real bad, that’s got to be one of the sweetest things in life. He gets another sunny morning; Patch doesn't. So he's not gonna waste it. 

“So, I have a decent guess for how the Commission found us,” Five says. Five’s not savouring the moment so much as pacing the living room. “I’ve thoroughly searched for tracking devices in our vehicle and our clothing and effects; nada.”

“Wait,” Diego says, “you went through our _laundry_?”

“Without a tracking device,” Five breezes on, “standard Commission procedure is to search by algorithm. They’ll have calculated our likeliest routes, behaviours, and practical needs, and set up multiple ambushes.”

“Wait,” Luther says, “you’re saying they sent a squad to a whole bunch of Walmarts?”

“To all kinds of places,” Five says. He pauses, takes a swig from his coffee mug. “When I acquired this safehouse, I figured it was unpredictable enough to throw them off, but”—he shrugs—“guess they know me better than I thought.”

“Shouldn’t we be getting out of here as soon as we can?” Allison says. 

“Not necessary,” Five says. He pulls a notepad and pen out of his pocket. “We have injuries, we need time to plan—and given the distribution pattern of big box stores in this area of the continental US—which fortunately I’ve had memorised for four decades—I can calculate with a fair amount of accuracy how long it will take their sweep to reach our location.” He perches on the edge of a couch, pulls the top off the pen and flips open the notebook. “I’ll do it now. There’s usually plenty of irrelevant rambling at these family sessions.”

Diego catches Klaus pulling a face at Ben, and Ben shaking his head. Funny to see both ends of that for once. 

Diego folds his arms and decides, with great restraint, to save his comeback for a little later in the meeting. Besides, Five seems to be the only one of them with a clue what’s going on right now. 

“Still,” Allison says. 

“Yeah,” Luther adds. “Staying seems like quite a risk.”

“Like I said, not much of a risk,” Five says. “Their methods are going to follow standard operating procedure to a tee.”

“Even though you know they’re doing that?” Allison says. 

Five shrugs. “Back at the home office, they’ll take protocol over smart moves every time. Bureaucrats to the bone. It’s the solo operatives we’d need to really worry about.”

“Like Hazel and Cha Cha?” Diego says. 

“Like me,” Five says coolly, turning to his notepad. 

“So,” Diego says, “we need to debrief about the Vanya gun.”

“The what?” Luther says. 

“Y’know,” Diego says, “the clothes iron thing they’ve got that sonics you into the air and shit.” 

“Are we calling it that?” Vanya says, wrinkling her nose. “Could we call it something else, like literally anything else?”

“It flows better than White Violin Gun,” Ben says. 

“Please not the code name again,” Vanya murmurs. 

“Nope,” Ben says, “we’re including you, this is what it’s like. Constantly feeling mortified about your stupid code name is a vital part of the Academy experience. If you don’t go with White Violin, we’ll just pick something worse.”

“The Vanyanator,” Klaus says. 

“The gun or me?” Vanya says. 

“The gun,” Klaus says, “but if you really want—” Vanya shakes her head vigorously. 

“The Vanyazooka,” Diego says.

Luther frowns. “What?”

“The gun! Like a bazooka, only it Vanyas you.”

Ben shakes his head. “Doesn’t work. It’s too hard to say and you have to work out what it means after.” He has a little cheeky grin on his face, the look of someone who knows they have a lot of other people’s goodwill to burn, and is maybe having slightly too much fun with that. “Anyway,” he continues, “it doesn't even look like a rocket launcher, it’s more like a boom box that Vanyas you. Hey, boom box!”

“He’s got the soul of a poet,” Klaus says, hand on his chest. 

“Okay, but could my name also please not be a verb?” Vanya says. “It’s like if next time someone throws a knife at my face, which is kind of disturbingly a lot lately, I’m gonna say they’re Diegoing me.” 

“I’m good with that,” Diego says. He takes a swig of black coffee, savours the aromatic punch of it. “It’s like I’m so shit hot I’m a verb.”

“If we could focus,” Five says, back in the room. “The uh, boom box seems designed to replicate Vanya’s powers in a rudimentary way.” 

“And it drained me,” Vanya says, visibly relieved at a way of moving on the conversation. “It was like it drained my batteries.”

Five says, “I don’t think you have batteries, so to speak. You seem to be channelling sonic energy from around you.” He hops off the couch arm and paces a few steps. “It’s the ability to channel it that the device is targetting.” He looks up at Vanya, snaps his fingers. “It un-tunes you!”

“Yeah!” Vanya says. “That was exactly what it felt like, like being strung out of tune and I couldn’t fix it.” 

“And another thing,” Diego says. “After they hit me with that thing at the Walmart, I couldn’t aim for shit. It was like having rocks in my head.” 

“Well,” says Five, turning back to his notes, “you’ve probably just got a concussion. I was fine after.”

“Oh, _thank you_ ,” Diego says. “But no, listen, when they first got me with one of those back at the house, the dizziness passed off real quick and then I slung a couple of blades in the guy no problem. Yesterday it was different.”

“I think the gun’s probably designed mostly to use on Vanya, though,” Luther says. “I mean, she is far more powerful than you.”

“And you, bro,” Diego says. “She’s the MVP of the apocalypse, that’s how we got into this.” Vanya winces a little, because apparently she’s allergic to people pointing out she’s badass. 

“No,” Five says, “it makes sense the boom box is more powerful now. Standard Commission procedure: after the failed mission at the house, R and D would have gone back to the drawing board, designed an improved version.” 

“How?” Luther says. “It’s been like a day.” 

Five gives him a weary, teacherly look. “Do we have to go over the definition of time travel again?” Five says. “ From the looks of things, for them it’s been a hell of a lot longer than a day. This isn’t like before, the apocalypse is a full operation for them now. Do you have any idea how many people they’ll have working on this case at the home office alone?”

Everyone glances at each other. Nobody, unsurprisingly, does have any idea. Five doesn’t elaborate. 

Ben jiggles his eyebrows at Klaus. 

“Oh, by the way, Five,” Klaus says. “Spoke to a friend of yours last night from your assassin glory days. Mikey DeCarlo, 1970s Jersey mobster with a penchant for olive polyester?”

“DeCarlo …” Five tilts his head, considering. “Ah! Yeah. I remember him.”

“‘Kay,” Klaus says. “Jesus, what’d you take him out with, an elephant gun? It was very …” Klaus makes an evocative hand gesture.

“I don't recall,” Five says. He shrugs. “Probably my regular piece, in which case, yeah.”

“You used this place to _kill_ people?” Luther says. 

“Not primarily,” Five says. 

There’s an awkward pause. Can't do a family meeting without a few of those. 

“Okay,” says Klaus, “related follow-up. This might be a weird question, but did you ever use to wear, like, a wolf mask?”

“Of course not!” Five looks offended. “That kind of theatrics was never my style. I preferred to blend.” 

“Well,” Klaus says, “my new pal Mikey claimed you, like past, old person, you, were sitting in the corner over there last night in a wolf mask, watching us eating dinner. You or someone else equally scary.” 

“That’s kind of disturbing,” Allison says slowly. “Did you see anything?”

Klaus shrugs and scrunches his face. “Nothing. I mean, I was exhausted, my side hurt like a bastard, I was kinda focussing in on my carbohydrates. It wasn’t like I knew there’d be anyone but Ben hanging about.”

“Five,” Diego says, “ring any bells? You kill a guy in a wolf mask here?” 

“This isn’t my—murder room!” Five snaps. “I only brought a mark here because there were complications. A Commission operative had gone rogue, Mr DeCarlo had the misfortune to cut a deal with him. So, I needed to handle things quietly.”

“Oh,” Ben says. “So you just murdered that one guy here. What a relief.”

“Mikey’s _very_ concerned we’ve brought a child into this situation, by the way,” Klaus says, leaning forward and pressing a hand to his chest. “Should we be saving you from yourself?” He looks around. “Saving—” he circles his hand. “No. Okay. Fine, fine, it didn’t land.”

“It landed,” Ben says, “it just wasn’t that funny.”

“Ben?” Allison says. “What about you? Did you see anything?”

“Nope,” Ben says, “it doesn’t work like that. Not for me, anyway. I’m kind of—tied to Klaus, for some reason, lucky me. I only see who he conjures.”

“Well,” Diego says. “Klaus conjured this Mikey guy.”

“ _Well_ ,” Klaus says, drawing himself up, “actually, speaking of new things that are not actually that far-fetched, it was in a dream.” 

Diego manages an aggravated snort. Allison sighs, Luther mutters _c’mon_ , Five tuts, Vanya looks off to the side. 

“No, no,” Klaus says, “if you could all please hear me out? I have a track record, thank you, actually now the good kind of track record, Luther, _I see you_.”

Luther wrinkles his nose at Klaus’ finger jab. “Why me?”

“Listen,” Klaus says, “it was like a lucid dream. I’ve never done this before, it just happened! Five remembers this Mikey guy, I mean he blew his head off, memorable, so I’ve got back-up.”

Five has gone back to his notepad. He mutters to himself as he scribbles. 

“So, conjure the guy again,” Luther says. “Ask him more.”

“Well,” Klaus says, “it’s not that simple. I didn’t call him deliberately, I mean most of the time I don’t—”

“Yes, you do,” Ben says, rolling his eyes. “It’s always you doing it, you just don’t think it’s you.” 

“Fine,” Klaus says, “fair point, conscious control of my stupid powers a work in progress. But. Mikey told me he was hiding. I can’t call people if they really don’t want to answer. He told me he came to the dream because—it was safe. Also because he liked what I’d done with the place, I kind of zhooshed the cabin up in my dream, made it less of a dump.”

“What,” says Ben, “like, blacklight posters and five tea sets and patchouli incense sticks?”

“Screw you,” Klaus says easily. “Actually it was more—”

“I’m done with my calculations,” Five says, standing. “We have six days until they find us.”

“Oh my god,” Vanya says. She leans forward, wrings her hands together. “Sorry. Sorry, it’s just—is this our lives now? We’re just going to keep running forever?”

“No,” Five says, “they’ll catch up to us eventually. We’re buying time.”

“Time for what?” Luther says. “I mean, it’s kind of hard not to notice we’re really heavily outgunned here.” 

“Vanya’s right,” Diego says. “I mean, what about Grace and Pogo? You said they were safe, but we can’t just leave them locked in the attic or wherever. It’s been two days now.”

Five’s face tightens briefly. He says, slowing down a little, “Grace will be fine. She’ll power down eventually but she can survive indefinitely, and it’s important they don’t find her. She knows far too much. We need to focus on our next move.”

“Wait,” Vanya says, “what about Pogo? Is he somewhere different?”

Five looks around at them all. His face is rigid with tension. He looks at his hands, presses his lips together. 

Diego gets a sick feeling. “Five?” he says.

“Pogo didn’t make it,” Five says. 

Diego could see it coming, like when you crash a car and it’s all slow motion for a moment, but he still yells, “what the _fuck_?” Everyone else talks too, all at once. Diego makes out Vanya saying “you didn’t tell us? Why?”, sees Klaus putting a hand over his face, Ben closing his eyes, Allison open-mouthed. 

“He died at the house?” Luther says. Five nods. Luther takes three steps forward and looms over Five, bending forward enough to get in his face. His voice raises. “Why the _hell_ did you keep that from us?” Five doesn’t answer. He just eyeballs Luther, like a weiner dog squaring up to a German Shepherd. Luther carries on yelling, his voice cracking. “We deserved to know! Pogo is family! You had no right—” 

Diego hops to his feet and strides over, preparing to get between them. He might be mad as fuck at Five right now but the little prick, deadly as he might be, is a quarter of Luther’s size, and Diego’s not going to let that shit fly. 

Luther lifts his chin, straightens, and turns his back on Five, the muscles of his shoulders working. He doesn’t even seem to have noticed Diego coming over to break it up. Luther stiffens for a moment, closing and opening his hands. Then he puts a hand over his eyes, exhales harshly, strides off to the end of the room. He starts to pace. 

Diego drops back down onto the couch. 

Pogo. Diego’s never really seen eye to eye with him; he was always torn between infuriation at his placid loyalty to Dad, his need to defend every piece of bullshit—and knowing full well where it came from. Maybe without Dad he’d have a chance now, Diego had thought. Him and Mom. They could both get their minds free. Now that’s gone too. 

Pogo wouldn’t raise a hand to anyone. Wasn’t in him. He didn’t stand a chance. They didn’t even need to kill him. That’s just what happens when you get between the Commission and their targets. 

Five is slumped against the couch arm now, arms folded, looking down. Vanya looks like she’s going to break down any second. Klaus is scrubbing at his eyes. Luther is still pacing at the end of the room, turned away from them, his shoulders hunched. Abruptly, Diego realises Luther’s not trying to keep his temper, he’s trying to stop crying. For some reason, that’s what tears it for Diego. He works his jaw. _This_ shit is not gonna fly. 

“Well?” Diego says. “Five? You wanna start talking? You owe us an explanation.”

“I was focussing on saving the living.” The bravado has dropped out of Five’s voice. “Pogo was—he was too far gone when I found him. There wasn’t anything I could do. I got Grace to safety, I got Klaus stable, I got us somewhere secure.”

“And then you just happened not to tell us Pogo died,” Allison says. 

“We’re in a survival situation,” Five says. “You may have noticed. It wasn’t gonna help operational efficiency. We can mourn later—if there’s a later.” 

“Wow,” Ben says, “that’s some complete horseshit. Were you even going to tell us at all?”

“What does that even mean, operational efficiency?” Vanya says. She’s twisting her fingers together. Diego can see little rippling twists of air folding through her hands, like heat haze on a road. It’s disquieting. “I was so worried,” she says, “about Klaus and Mom and Pogo—and then—I thought everyone was safe—” Her voice gets a little higher and sharper. “Was this because you thought I was gonna _do something_?”

There’s a moment of dead silence. Everyone stares at Vanya, at the air bending like smoke around her hands. 

Vanya looks down. She unclasps her hands quickly, spreads them, squeezes her eyes shut. “Great,” she mutters. “And you’re all freaking because I’m _upset_?” Vanya shakes her head. “Pogo—this is awful, everyone feels awful—do you think I don’t get to care because of what I did to him?” Her voice is cracking now. Klaus reaches out and touches her arm; she flinches and shrugs him off. “Do you know how much—I know what I did, I wanted to take it back so much—” 

Allison comes in now, hovers near her, waiting. Vanya just shakes her head and hunches in more.

“You know what,” she says, “you guys don’t get to have it both ways. One minute you’re all _yay, great job dropping a Walmart on those assholes, have a stupid code name, MVP_ , the next you’re looking at me like I’m this bomb you’ve all got to defuse. I don’t even know how many people I’ve killed now!” Her voice has gone loud and quavering and ragged. She looks like she’s about to bust out crying. “And you know, I actually know how fucked up that is. Not sure anyone else around here does.” 

She gets up, walks out. This time, though, it’s not so much nervous fleeing as emphatic stomping. 

A few moments later, the sound of her violin starts up from upstairs. Outside, the wind catches up; the trees creak. Uh oh. Various people exchange nervous glances. 

Ben looks around the room and rolls his eyes. “Guys, she’s not going to cave the house in. She’s just rattling some branches to rile you all up, because she’s pissed.”

Allison sighs. “Let’s give her some space.” She wipes at her eyes. “We could probably all use that.”

“That was out of order,” Diego says. “She wants to play it like that, she better be ready for us to spill some tea as well.”

“We’re all upset,” Luther says. 

“No shit,” Klaus mutters. 

Five, without saying a word, stands up and blinks out of the room. 

Ben stands, then darts his eyes around and frantically gestures at Klaus. “Hang up, dude,” he hisses. “I’m out.” Klaus raises a hand, flaps it tiredly. Then Ben, too, is gone. 

“So,” Luther says. “To sum up. We lost Pogo. Five’s been keeping that a secret and God knows what else. Which is unfortunate because he’s the only one who knows what the hell’s going on. We destroyed a rural Walmart, we have six days max until the Commission tracks us down and slaughters us, Vanya is possibly about to explode because she’s mad we think she might explode, and also it’s marginally possible that we’re being stalked by an invisible guy dressed as the wolfman.” He blinks and shakes his head. “It’s not even ten a.m.”

***

The hammock turns out to be a trap, of course.

After it showed up in the dream, Klaus remembered the old hammock in a cardboard box from when he was rooting around in that cupboard under the stairs, and he thought, why not? But after Klaus has finally successfully slung it onto the hooks left on the porch columns, then finally successfully managed to load himself into it, he realises in order: that he didn’t bring any water, that he didn’t bring a book or any other means of entertainment, and that he is now in enough pain that there’s no fucking way he’s getting out again. 

It occurs to him that not so long ago, he’d have had the solution to this issue literally in his back pocket. He spends a few seconds hypothetically debating if he'd have preferred pills or weed, then tells his stupid brain to fuck off, then realises that here he is, alone and in pain and very sober and trapped in a hammock. In fact, his brain not only has the advantage in this situation, but has him at its mercy. 

This is the point, of course, that Five shows up. 

“I need to think,” he announces, “and my notes are out here.”

Klaus looks at the mess of chalked equations covering the walls of the porch. He waves an expansive hand. “Bitte schön. Knock yourself out.”

“And for that I need solitude and quiet,” Five says. “You need to get out.”

Klaus lifts his head enough to give Five his best WTF face, then he flops back into the hammock. “I was here first,” he says. “You don’t _own_ the porch.”

“Actually,” Five says, “I own the whole house.”

Klaus sighs. “Well, it took me ten minutes to set up the hammock and another ten to get in it. So, tough.”

“This is actually important. Don’t be childish.”

“Says the guy arguing over dibs on the porch. You know what, maybe _I’m_ doing something important.”

“Are you?” Five, weirdly enough, seems to be asking a genuine question. “Are you trying to conjure the mystery man in the wolf mask?”

Yeah, why not? “Sure.” Klaus raises a finger. “Are we all sharing our activities now, with the group? I didn’t get the memo.”

“Are you _pissed_ at me?” Five says. He actually sounds surprised. 

“Uh. Everyone’s pissed at you.” Klaus shakes his head. “You think you covered yourself in glory back there? You can’t keep us in the dark about shit like that, Five, operational efficiency is gonna be real swell now we know we can’t trust you worth a damn.”

Klaus is surprised to find there’s a short pause before Five says anything in return. He keeps himself busy staring a hole in the porch roof.

“That’s harsh,” Five says, quieter. 

“Harsh?” Klaus says. He laughs to himself, shakes his head. “Okay. Okay, wow. You left Pogo dead and you told us a little white lie about it. I mean what were you gonna do if _I’d_ died back there? Dump my body in the basement and tell everyone I went to Cancun?”

“Of course not!” Five snaps. “You think I don’t care? I do. Everything I do—”

“Is for us? Yeah, yeah,” Klaus says. “That doesn't mean it's all cool, you know. I mean, not to play the old war card, bro, but you know this is the absolute exact kind of shit that used to get guys fragged by their own troops?”

Five rounds on him. “Is that a _threat_?”

“Oh my god.” Klaus puts his hands over his face and sighs into them. “What the fuck, of course not.” 

“Then what’s your point?”

“I dunno, I dunno. You’re my weird little brother and I love you but, Five, Five. That was some Dad-level shit, and nobody likes that.”

Five says, quieter, “I’ve spent my whole life trying to save all of you. That’s your takeaway?”

“No-o,” Klaus says, thinking he’s hit a nerve, in two minds about walking this back a little, “it’s—”

“Come to think of it,” Five says, cocksure smile back in place, wagging a finger at him, “I saved _your_ life a couple days back. The gratitude is overwhelming.”

That tears it. Klaus ditches the idea of walking this back. He pulls himself upright with the hammock rope and gives Five a big insincere grin. “Thank you,” he says, folding his hands in mock-prayer, “thank you so very much. And you know what, FYI, maybe next time you save my life you could hold off on filling me full of morphine. I mean, I _love_ morphine, I do, but in case it slipped your mind, that’s kind of the whole fucking problem right there.”

Five rolls his eyes. “What, you’re pissed you don’t get your six month chip or something? Sobriety’s a hell of a great look on a corpse.”

Klaus is so angry he feels like his whole body’s trembling with it. He’s weirdly grateful to be currently physically unable to get up, because it would be so very wrong to punch his thirteen-going-on-fifty-eight year old brother right on the nose. “Super,” he says, and thinks _fuck it_ , he’ll say it. “Feel like elaborating? Because I don’t know how you got me back, Five, but you don’t just put a bandaid on a bullet in the lung.” 

“I know that,” Five hisses. “Which is how you’re still here. You don’t have the first idea of the shit I’ve been through or the shit I’ve had to learn to do.”

Klaus turns his face away for a moment. Yeah, okay. His brain has been saying, hit your lung, medevac, they’d try to get you stable and if you didn’t die on the ground or in the air, next thing everyone would hear you’d been shipped to some cushy hospital in Japan. But here Klaus is, healing, or he thinks maybe. If not a little bedside manner, he could expect at least a little bedside info.

“Yeah,” he says softly. “That’s the problem, remember, you don’t tell us shit.” Klaus is a hypocrite. He himself is a lifelong expert in avoiding telling anyone shit, even when someone actually asks. He laughs to himself. “Think you could at least give me a heads up if I’m likely to wake up with a nasty surprise tomorrow like Luther did?”

“Klaus.” Something in Five’s voice makes him turn and make eye contact again. He’s serious. Quieter. “I did not use any of Dad’s crap on you.” Klaus exhales, relieved. He does believe him; but he’s so aggravated that things have gotten so he had to even ask. “You wanna know what I did?” Five says. The same tone: low, miserably emphatic, _you’ve got no idea._ “I gave oxygen, fluids and plasma, I drained the blood compressing your lung, got out the bullet, sewed up the hole. And yes, I gave you morphine, because I was treating for, shock, and I did everything I could possibly do to keep you alive. And it worked.” Five is looking into the middle distance now, and Klaus is starting to feel like he’s kicked him too hard. It registers, slowly, that Five loves him, and that Five was scared. “I’ve had a lifetime,” Five says, “alone, in an apocalyptic death trap of a planet to learn how to fix myself because no one else was going to. So say thank you, take your damn antibiotics on time and stop with the bullshit accusations.” 

“Thank you,” Klaus says. His anger is cooling, and now he feels like a dick. Five doesn’t exactly make it easy, but then, when did Klaus ever make it easy? “Five,” he says, “why didn’t you say something about Pogo?” 

Five looks down and shakes his head. There’s a pause. “Y’know,” he says, “it’s funny. I don’t even know. Just somehow never seemed to be the right time.”

Klaus looks at Five, feels a sudden wave of sadness for the poor bastard. God, what a clusterfuck. Five jumped all of them to 2019, which must have flattened him already, then there was the Commission raid, Pogo and Grace, Klaus getting himself shot and field surgery and then engineering the whole getaway thing. No wonder Five crashed out so hard in the van. No wonder he wasn’t dealing with shit. Then another ambush, another rough firefight, and—Klaus closes his eyes. Sometimes it just keeps coming.

“Hey,” he says. “You guys picked up a couple card decks, right? Feel like a game of Crazy Eights?” 

Five looks at him for a moment, then he looks away, half-smiles. “Don’t think I even remember how to play.”

“You’ll pick it back up in no time, smart guy. The main rule is play mean.” He raises a finger. “But I think you’ll find I have gotten a lot meaner since we were thirteen.” 

Five exhales, shakes his head. “Another time. Right now I gotta think. I need to plan …”

Klaus moves his mouth around. Wow, is he terrible at this. He tries anyway. “You need, maybe you need a break? Take a walk, I dunno, a nap?” Five doesn’t say anything. “Five?” he says. “You know … I get we’re a bunch of screwed-up assholes.” That gets a little chuckle. “But we stick together, okay? It’s not all on you any more.”

“Yeah,” Five says, looking at his shoes. “Not that easy to change the habit of a lifetime.”

Klaus exhales. “Well,” he says, “you’re right on that one. It’s … really relentlessly hard, actually. But you can change those.”

“Maybe.” Five shrugs. He’s still looking down. He shakes his head. “Maybe I’m a little old to learn new tricks.”

The door to the porch clicks, and Five’s gone in, and Klaus has, apparently, gained dibs on the porch. It doesn’t feel particularly like a victory.

***

Of course, because they’re all perpetually under some kind of curse, it’s that afternoon—while everyone is avoiding each other and trying to retreat to separate corners of a cabin that doesn’t, in fact, have enough separate corners for six people and a ghost to sulk in privacy—that the plumbing breaks down.

Diego goes to rinse a mug in the kitchen sink, only to find that when he turns on the tap, two inches full of murky greenish-brown water bubble up from the plughole. It stinks like a sewer. He checks upstairs to find it’s the same story with the bathtub, and the toilet is straight up better not mentioned. 

“Guys,” Diego calls, “looks like someone’s fucked the plumbing.” 

The smell draws everyone out of their corners. They throw open all the windows and congregate on the porch. 

“Septic tank might be clogged,” Luther says. “Five, you know when it was last serviced?”

Five looks up from where he’s scratching more sums on the wall with a stub of chalk, and stares at Luther like he’s suddenly speaking Swahili.

“Well, you have to maintain them,” Luther says. 

“I’ve been a little busy,” Five says, a dangerous tone in his voice.

“Anyway,” Luther says, “probably the entry pipe’s blocked. We need to pop open the cover and take a look.”

“Since when do you know about this stuff?” Diego asks; his first thought is maybe Luther’s bluffing. 

“Since I installed one of these things and lived with it for four years.”

“Huh,” Diego says. “Sounds like a riot.”

So they look for the cover. Five doesn’t know where it is; apparently it’ll be out front, or out back, or round the side, or under the deck, or in the basement. 

That’s what leads Diego back into the increasingly stinky house to try that door next to the cupboard under the stairs. It’s held shut by two big heavy bolts, and it looks like there used to be a padlock there too. Well, that’s not creepy. Diego tries the bolts. They're rusted and stiff, but a couple of jiggles and a good slam gets the top one sliding open, and the second one gives after a couple of shoves with his boot heel. The air behind the door is chilly and damp. He takes the flashlight and shines it down a set of wooden stairs, picks out a concrete floor.

“Hey,” he calls, “think I just found Five’s murder room.”

“It is not my murder room!” Five says, blinking into the space right next to him. “That's the basement.”

“It can't be both? I saw Sweeney Todd. Why else you need those bolts and the thing to put a padlock on, you got some really big rats?”

“I don't know!” Five gives him a scathing, irritable look that makes Diego all the more determined to carry on giving him shit. “I’ve never even been down here.” 

Diego starts down the stairs. “Well, could the cover to the tank be down here?”

“No idea,” Five says. He zaps into the spot of basement floor Diego’s flashlight picks out, and looks around him.

The basement is really everything you’d want it to be if you were making one of those idiots-in-a-cabin horror movies. Spiderwebs, check. Smell of damp, check. Gross mummified rat corpses, check and ew. He steps to one side to avoid the bared-teeth grin of vintage rat number three, and—his foot catches in something and his ankle turns. He flails to one side, puts his hand out to break his fall, and instead of wall, he hits a tangle of metal that pokes him squarely in all the sore bits of his left side. Diego pushes off it, wincing, and shines his flashlight. The light catches some kind of big fork thing poking large, nasty, hooked spikes right out into the room.

“Shi-it!” Diego says, stepping back. “What the hell is that?” He shines the flashlight on it some more. Two huge, rusted metal wheels, the big fork thing in the middle. “What is that, like a gardening, farming—tool?”

“A plough,” Five says. “I guess.”

“Well,” Diego says, “you might wanna tidy your murder room, it’s a fricking health hazard. You know how many Americans a year die from accidents in the home?”

“Stop calling it the murder room!”

“Okay, okay,” says Diego, raising his hands in a peacemaking gesture. “So, which room is the murder room, then? Better not be mine.”

“I’m ignoring you,” Five says. He kicks aside a mouldy blanket on the floor, looking for the tank cover. Diego skitters the flashlight around. No sign.

“If there isn’t a murder room,” Diego says, “where’d you do Mikey the gangster?”

“Don’t recall,” Five says. “Wait. Out back past the porch, that was it.”

“Jesus, Five,” Diego says. 

“Don’t,” Five says. “Not in the mood for a schoolboy ethics debate.”

“Hey guys,” Allison calls down the stairs. “Luther found the tank cover. It was out front under the dirt.”

“Terrific,” Diego says. “Remember that thing you said to Vanya about how being helpful will end up biting you in the ass? Looks like Luther just volunteered to unclog a miniature sewer.” He checks his wristwatch as he comes up the stairs. “And hey, it’s three o’clock. I’m up for watch.” 

While Luther’s got his head down a manhole full of crap, Diego will be out patrolling the woods, protecting his family but not without actually having to deal with them in person, in the nice fresh air. The afternoon is looking up.

***

From the hammock, out of the corner of his eye, Klaus looks around. His stomach is flipping, twisting itself up with nerves and dread. It’s super helpful, thanks.

The kicker when it comes to conjuring people, specific people, is that Klaus has never really known how the hell it works. For so many years, of course, it didn’t work. Ben aside, the only dead people he saw seemed to sidle along of their own accord after he’d run out of drugs. Annoyingly enough, they always then claimed _he’d_ called _them_. 

One thing Klaus does know is that when he’s trying to conjure someone, overthinking it doesn’t help. The best strategy he’s been able to arrive at since he got back into the groove, as it were, is the same one he had at fourteen years old. Klaus tells himself that whoever he’s trying to conjure has shown up already, and looks around to see where they’ve gotten to, as if they stepped out to go to the can and he’s trying to see if they’re back yet. _Oh, hey, there you are._ It actually usually seems to work, within reason. 

There are other rules of thumb. They’re far more likely to show up if they’re hanging around a person or place anyway. Looking around to see who’s nearby usually works, in fact it works whether Klaus wants it to or not. Spirits are more likely to show if they died recently, or nearby, or both. Klaus has a long list of failed celebrity conjurings to prove this rule. And sometimes, the ones who’ve moved on wherever they go just can’t hear you, or aren’t listening any more, or are too far away. 

Fifty years ago on the other side of the world: that definitely qualifies as far away, and long ago. So there’s that. 

Dave—yeah, it’s about him, who else is it ever about?—doesn’t seem the type to have just hung out watching the living for that long either. He took things as they came, didn’t bear grudges, was sweet-tempered and calm and pragmatic and shockingly, beautifully accepting. He was kind of lowkey religious, too, though it turns out, according to him, the official Jewish afterlife theory is “who knows, eh?” so that’s not exactly a solid clue. 

So Klaus looks around. He _makes himself_ look around, any time he’s alone, and anytime he can be quiet, and say himself that Dave’s already there, just past the corner of his eye, just standing in his blind spot, is all. If Klaus had been actively seeking a guaranteed way to feel like he’s been hit in the chest with a mallet at least once a day, he really couldn’t have done better. 

After a while—two minutes, seventy-two hours, maybe he should get a watch or something—Klaus decides he’s filled his daily agony quota. He pulls Dave’s tags out from under his shirt, presses a kiss to them like always, rubs his eyes and takes a few good breaths, deep as he can without pissing off the hole in his lung. Then he decides he may as well do the thing he was claiming to be doing all along. He calls up Mikey. 

Mikey, of course, doesn’t show, the chickenshit. 

Maybe he should try to do the lucid dream thing again? Mikey said he felt like it was safer, plus it was weird and interesting, and weird and interesting is better than bored and miserable, usually. Klaus could use an alternative to the two other currently showing options on the old brain theatre: “the person I love is dead and it’s unbearable and I’m never going to fucking find him,” and the less elevated but classic “dammit, I miss being high as balls and maybe I should take a tiny little mini-break from this sobriety thing and _fuck you brain shut up_ ”. 

Of course, then he spends a fun hour trying and failing to go to sleep. He knows it’s that long because the watch changes, and Diego, heading out, informs him with smugness that Luther gets to fix the septic tank and that from now on the basement should be referred to as the murder room because it will annoy Five. Being trapped together in the wilderness seems to be progressing towards mutual mass murder even faster than it did when they were kids. 

After Diego leaves, Klaus resumes trying to bludgeon his mind into submission. No luck. 

“Ben, I can’t sleep, tell me something boring!” he calls. No Ben. Hmm. Well, he’s entitled to sulk childishly in a corner just like the rest of them are. 

Klaus reaches an odd kind of peace with it, after a while. Can’t sleep, ignoring sounds of own brain, might as well zone out. Rhythm of the gently swaying hammock, rhythm of the birds calling, of the wind. (The throbbing of crickets in the warm night, helicopter rotors like overblown bluebottles, soft quiet breeze through the tent, soft breathing from the cot next to him, sweetest sound in the world.)

The hammock sways. The wind breathes through the trees. And then, for a moment, he feels the world tilt around dizzily, and then something—something happens like freefall, flying or falling—and he flails but can't move a muscle. And so, panicking, he goes down and down into the dark. 

“Shit,” Mikey says, looking down at Klaus. “What happened to you? You look like someone clobbered you over the head.”

Klaus sits up, groaning and patting at his skull. “Well, look who’s talking. At least mine’s a hundred per cent there. I think.” 

Mikey laughs, easy and unoffended. 

Klaus is on the floor of the porch. Did he fall out of the hammock? He puts a hand to his side. No bullet hole. He managed it, isn’t he? He’s in the dream place. It's dark outside now. Warm red light from the inside of the house. And something—something like a light is darting and blinking in the gloom of the forest. “Do you see that?” he says to Mikey.

“The light?” 

“Yup. Come on.” Klaus hops up, energised. He’s had an idea. Well, more of a poorly thought out impulse, but that works too. 

“Come on and what?” Mikey asks. 

“The wolf mask guy. Turns out it isn't Five. Let's go look for him out there.”

“ _Look_ for him?” Mikey pulls half a face. “Remember how I went to some trouble to warn you about this creepy SOB?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Klaus says. “Hey, there's a kid involved, remember? Besides, it's not like the ghost of Mister Wolf can do anything to you.”

“I'm telling you,” Mikey says, “he's not dead.” 

“But you _are_! See, you're still cool. What's he gonna do to you?” Mikey looks unconvinced. “C’mon, Let's go check it out, what else you doing right now?”

Mikey sighs. “Fine.”

That was unexpectedly easy. Maybe Mikey’s bored and in a bad mood too. 

“Hey, Ben?” Klaus calls. “Wanna back us up?” He looks around. “C’mon, Ben,” he sing-songs, “we’re gonna get in some trou-ble, you _love_ trouble.” He swings around, takes a three-sixty sweep of the porch. No Ben. Huh.

“Who's Ben?” Mikey says. 

“My brother,” Klaus says. “Deceased. If you both weren't being so antisocial, you'd have met already. Fine,” he calls in Ben’s non-direction, “be like that, but you're missing out on spookiness and maybe violence, don't complain later.”

Together, they walk into the darkened woods. It’s a moonlit night, but once they get into the trees, the darkness is close, overwhelming. Klaus shoves a hand into the pocket of his old army jacket, finds a couple of flashlights that definitely weren’t there when he was awake. 

“Here you go, Agent Mulder.” He holds one out. 

Mikey lights it up. “Got anything with a little more caliber?” he says. 

Klaus pats automatically at his waist. No weight of the belt on his hips, no pistol, no bayonet, no knife. “Nope,” he says. “Shit out of luck, apparently. I mean, sure we’re good here and all anyway.”

He still feels like he’s walking into the woods stark naked. 

The act of walking feels good, though: even shining the flashlight around, looking for that light they saw, on the alert, he can lose himself a little in the rhythm of it. It’s grounding, that’s it. He’s sick of being up in his own head. 

Of course, technically he still is in his own head, so there’s that. 

“So, where’d you serve?” Mikey says. 

“What?” Klaus darts a look at him. 

“Just making conversation.” Mikey jabs a finger at himself. “Korea, 2nd Infantry Division, 1951. I was nineteen, didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground. You?”

“Me what?” Klaus says. It’s not his best ever attempt at deflection. “Nowhere, why, you think I look like I know what the hell I’m doing?”

“Actually, yeah.” Mikey gives him a horribly shrewd look with his one eye. “You just get back home?”

Klaus studies the trees up ahead, does his best _didn't even hear you_. 

“C’mon, it’s not rocket science, you’re still wearing your tags.”

“Those aren’t mine,” Klaus says quickly. “How about we just focus on what’s-his-face out there?”

“Yeah,” says Mikey, “and you got your jacket there, and—” He shines his flashlight on Klaus’ tattooed left shoulder for a moment. “173rd Airborne, there ya go. Vietnam, right? Still going when I kicked it, how long did they drag that out for?”

“April, 1975,” Klaus says, feeling weary. 

“My nephew Vincent was drafted into the 173rd, did his tour couple years before I bit it. Vince DeCarlo, good kid, little dumb but good. Ring any bells?” Klaus stares ahead of him into the woods, doesn’t reply. “No fucking picnic, am I right?”

“Jesus,” Klaus mutters. 

“Okay, okay.” Mikey raises his hands. “I’m not tryna pry, okay? But, y’know. I’ve been there. Took a while to find my feet again after. Vince too. All it is, a guy can see you’re going through it here. You lost a good buddy, right? The tags?” Mikey gestures. “Rough shit. Especially for you, I’m imagining, what with the whole, psychic, medium thing.”

“Mikey!” Klaus freezes, wheels round, throws up his hands. “Could you do me a favour and take an enormous great hint?” 

“All right, all right,” Mikey says. 

“Thank you very very much, genuinely, for the empathy and the really surprising degree of emotional intelligence, but. We are not. Doing this right now. Okay?” Klaus takes a breath.

“Okay,” Mikey says. “But if you ever change your mind, want to grab a drink, shoot the shit, I’m here. Just so’s you know.”

They’ve gone a minute, a whole fucking minute of quiet walking through the forest, before Mikey turns to him again and says, “Can I ask you a personal question?”

Klaus sighs, resigned. “I think you’re going to.”

“This buddy of yours? Was he like, were you two?” Klaus gives him a sharp look. Mikey spreads his hands, conciliating; seems to be thinking for a moment. “Like were you, y’know, homosexual lovers?” Klaus opens his mouth and Mikey throws a hand up. “I’m not trying to insult you, Klaus. Y’know, one of my right hand men, Jimmy Knives, great guy, love that son of a bitch, he was one of the biggest fruits you could ever hope to meet. And y’know, one of the deadliest motherfuckers I ever knew, trusted him with my life. Terrific singer too, voice like Dean Martin. So, you know. I’m a live and let live kind of guy.”

Klaus shoves a hand into his hair. God, if this was any other topic, literally anything, he would be laughing his ass off. He can’t concentrate. He drags his hands down his face. “That’s great,” he says. “Thanks, Mikey. Kudos for, you know, picking up like seventy per cent of my recent life history by looking at me twice. Any more?”

“Yeah,” Mikey says. “I’ve seen other ghosts, time to time. I’m saying, you want me to keep an eye out for your young man? If I see him, I can try to put youse in touch.”

Klaus hauls in a deep breath, then lets it sigh out of him. The kindness of it tugs at his insides. Most of his irritation drops away. “Actually—you know what, yeah.” Couldn’t do any harm, after all. “Sergeant David Katz. Dave. Inch taller than me but twice the muscle, curly brown hair, blue eyes. Looks kind of like the Jewish Paul Newman.”

“Paul Newman _is_ Jewish,” Mikey says.

“Huh,” Klaus says. “And thank you. Seriously.”

Mikey slaps his shoulder a little too vigorously. “No problem.”

Two seconds later, something happens fast. 

There’s a blur of movement and someone swings out of the tree above them, kicks out in Mikey’s direction—Mikey takes the kick on the chin and goes down—and the person shoves into Klaus as they drop, knocks him down sideways. Klaus rolls, goes for his non-existent gun—then the person has sprung on top of him. He’s on his back, legs pinned. Klaus bucks his hips, tries to roll the guy off, but they’re heavy and they’re fucking strong. Klaus has dropped his flashlight, but in the darkness—yeah—he can pick out the outline of a wolf mask. 

Klaus shoves out his hands, tries to push the person back, and a hand clamps round his right wrist, pins his arm to the ground. Klaus registers the opening and automatically snaps out an uppercut with his left hand, going for under the mask, where the guy’s chin would be—

The face snaps and teeth sink into Klaus’ left wrist. Long teeth buried in his arm—long jaws—god, it _hurts_. Klaus screams, tries to dislodge his arm and—nasty breath in his face, wet drool and tongue on his skin, this thing— _it's not a mask, it’s not human_ —shakes his wrist in its mouth, growls. He kicks uselessly. This thing has the head of a wolf, and Klaus is pinned down, his throat is bared, and he twists his right wrist, _shit_ —

“Hey fucko!” Mikey yells. “Yeah, you, Halloween. You freeze right there or I’mma blow your brains out, capisce?” 

The wolf-man freezes. Mikey’s flashlight skitters onto its face. Its yellow eyes catch the light like mirrors. It’s staring into Klaus’ eyes, staring through him. It growls softly and its jaws slacken off on Klaus’ wrist, its hand lets go of his other arm. Klaus sobs in a pained breath, pulls his bleeding wrist back and clamps his other hand around the puncture wounds. _He said_ capisce _! Yay!_ says Klaus’ inner idiot, who never slacks off.

“There we go,” Mikey says. “Now get up nice and slow, grandmamma. Hands on your head, ya fucking mutt.” He kicks at the wolf’s side. 

Incredibly, the wolf man obeys. Klaus scrabbles back and sits up, his wrist throbbing. He peers at the creature. His stomach rolls. 

The creature is standing now. Klaus’ flashlight is only a couple of feet away. He retrieves it, shines it on the creature and gets a soft, deep growl for his trouble. From the neck up, it looks all wolf, but the hands it’s holding over its head are pale and human-looking. It’s wearing a thick dark shirt and pants, and its body is mostly human-shaped, but its torso is too long, the set of its shoulders strange, big and hunched. 

Klaus thinks of poor Pogo, and Luther. It occurs to him that he doesn’t know whether this is a human that’s gotten too wolfy or a wolf that’s gotten too human. And what _is it_ , is it a ghost or—what if this creature is like Klaus, what if it can do what he does? That’s another disturbing thought. Also, how the hell has Mikey got a gun now?

Klaus locks eyes with Mikey, standing behind its back, covering the creature. Mikey’s got the flashlight palmed and he’s covering the wolf-man, two-handed, with a twig. A fucking twig. Klaus stares at him, mouth open. Mikey quirks half a grin and shrugs.

The wolf-man stares at Klaus. It makes another low growling noise. Klaus looks into its yellow eyes and sees nothing, an alien blankness, the stare of a wild animal—then something shifts. The eyes narrow, and something about the expression isn’t animal any more. Klaus has a sudden and nasty sense of intelligence, of shrewd computation, of malice—

For a fractional horrible moment, Klaus realises what's about to happen. Then the creature whips round, grabs Mikey by the shoulders, and sinks its teeth into his throat. Mikey gurgles—there’s blood, immediately—and the thing shakes its head like a dog holding a bird. It snarls and rips and snaps again. 

Klaus staggers to his feet, preparing to jump on the creature’s back—and his ears ring and his head buzzes and _oh shit, I’m passing out_ —

He’s in the hammock. 

He’s in the hammock on the porch. It’s still daylight. _What a fucking dream_ , he thinks, then he registers. Something feels _wrong_. His left arm is throbbing; he feels dizzy, terrible, shit did he open up his stitches? He pats at his left side. No. No blood. 

Fuck. Fuck, was it just a dream, what even just happened? He groans and rubs his face. 

“Holy shit,” Ben says. He jogs over to Klaus from the other side of the deck, shoving a paperback into his pocket, and leans over him, eyes wide and alarmed. “Dude,” he says, “what happened to your arm?”

Klaus holds his left arm up in front of him. There are swollen red marks on his forearm and wrist: bite marks, showing the pattern of a huge jaw. “Shit,” he murmurs, looking back at Ben. 

“What happened?” Ben says again. “Was it the lucid dream thing?” Klaus looks at him, then back at his arm. Some of the bite marks are starting to open up as Klaus watches. He dabs at a spot of blood. “Shit,” Ben says softly. 

He and Ben stare at each other, share a silent, open-mouthed moment of mutual freak-out. 

“Klaus,” Ben says. “Did the Commission just … sic Freddy Krueger on us?”

Klaus shakes his head. “I have no idea. At all. But. Maybe yeah?”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks as usual to [majure](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Majure/pseuds/Majure) for their invaluable betaing, suggestions, cheerleading and bouncing of ideas around. I'm gonna plug their awesome Klaus/Dave epic [Ten Months](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18214736/chapters/43091279) again here because it's so goooood. Check it out, it has peril and feelings and snarky ghosts, it's good times.

At the kitchen table, Five briskly dabs the antiseptic-soaked cotton pad onto Klaus’ arm. Klaus hisses.

Five tuts. “Don’t be a baby.”

Klaus rolls his eyes at Ben. Ben shrugs, because it’s a long-established part of their dynamic that his job when Klaus requests sympathy is to give him a little shit.

“Hey,” Klaus says to Five, poking him in the arm, “go a little gentler or let me do it.” He peers at the bite marks that span his whole left forearm. “Shit, that’s really bruising. This is new and interesting.”

“Yeah,” Ben says. Sure is. He’s got a twisty feeling in the pit of his non-existent stomach. He folds his arms tighter. “So, tell me again, what exactly did you see that werewolf thing do to your ghost mobster buddy? He actually _hurt_ him?”

Klaus fixes Ben with one of those stray, effective empathy looks he keeps in his back pocket. “Ripped his throat right out.” His voice drops quieter. “Sorry.”

That’s a moment’s uncomfortable silence for everyone. Luther, hunched at the table, gives Ben sad eyes.

Ben huffs. “Guys, lay off. It’s been thirteen years. I think we got past _too soon_.” As soon as he’s said it, he realises from everyone’s faces that no one but him is past it. Well, that’s just great. Ben’s dealt with his death. Why is it his job to deal with everyone else dealing with it? 2003 he could handle: everyone was just overbearingly nice, got him milkshakes and let him get away with murder. Now he’s dead again, only Klaus keeps bringing him into the room so he has to look at everyone else’s tragedy faces and summon up the right response. Well, it’s _his_ freaking tragedy. What if he doesn’t want to mop them all up?

Okay, so Ben knows he’s being an ass about this. The whole thing sucks. He wasn't dead, now he is again. So he's right back where he started, only now it feels like a nice fresh wound, which is fun in itself, and everyone else's reheated grief is just, well, pouring a little lemon juice on it.

Side note, not even those months in 2003 got Ben used to dealing with people—that is, living people who were not specifically Klaus—again. It’s possible he’s not handling the whole human interaction thing completely superbly.

“How is any of this possible?” Luther asks Klaus. “I don’t get it. Did you somehow, I dunno, manifest this wolf guy?”

“ _No_ ,” Klaus says, screwing up his nose. “Please. If I wanted to be self-destructive in dreamland it wouldn’t be with a bitey cryptid, I’d manifest James Dean and a bucket of—” He catches everyone’s looks and flaps a hand. “Oh, _fine_.”

“Astral projection,” Five says, taping a dressing to Klaus’ wrist.

“What?” Klaus says. “I can’t do that.” His eyes dart around. “I can’t do that, right?”

“Not you,” Five says. “Him. Allison saw something too, remember?”

“Allison saw a hiker,” Luther says. There’s a tense edge to his voice that Ben suspects has nothing to do with the subject and everything to do with the person he’s speaking to.

“No trails round here,” Five says, oblivious or ignoring it. “I chose this spot carefully.”

“Or someone out hunting, I dunno.” Luther shrugs, exasperated. “Come on! Astral projection? It’s a little far-fetched.”

“Yeah,” Ben says. “Crazy talk. Hi everyone.” He whooshes his hand through a stack of dishes. Then he remembers that on the current issue of Five, and Five concealing important shit, like Pogo’s death, he’s very much on Team Luther. So he flashes Luther a sympathetic smile.

“Okay,” Luther says, “okay, point taken. We’re all crazy talk. But.” Then he just seems to run out of steam. He shakes his head, stares at the table.

“As in, someone else with powers?” Klaus says.

“Not necessarily,” Five says. “This is the Commission’s work. I’m about,” he pulls a face, “ninety-two per cent sure.”

“So how’s it work, then?” Klaus says.

“Quantum physics,” Five says.

“Well, that’s specific,” Luther says.

“Really?” Five says. “Want me to lay on the full explanation? Remember how we time-travelled to 2003? I projected our consciousnesses into our adolescent bodies by having us enter a quantum superposition of states, the division of which I then calculated, on the spot I might add, between B, the closed timelike curve, not that you’d know what that is, and A, an external subsystem which—”

“Okay,” Luther says, holding up a hand, “okay, you’ve made your point. You’re smarter than we are, well done. Now what is this thing, how does it work and what do we do about it?”

“R and D,” Five says. “The metaphysics department can build bodies, rebuild them.”

“Is that how this guy has the … wolf head?” Ben asks. “He’s really got that? He’s actually half wolf?”

Five nods. “It’s extreme, but. Physically augmenting agents isn’t unknown. Always took a hard pass on it myself, but I’ve seen … other examples.” He shrugs. “It’s actually considered quite prestigious.”

“Someone _volunteered_ for _that_?” Luther shakes his head. “That’s insane.”

“Yeah, well,” Five says. “The Commission doesn’t waste its time hiring the well-adjusted.”

“And what about the astral projecting thing?” Klaus says. “I’m fairly super uncomfy with that.”

“I don't know,” Five says. “Theoretically it's possible. We know the human consciousness can manifest independently from its physical form.” He gestures at Ben. “It's fascinating, really.”

“Yay,” Klaus says colourlessly.

“So, it’s got powers?” Luther asks.

Five shakes his head. “Maybe not. Scuttlebutt was that the metaphysics department were working on some experimental briefcases. This could be that.”

“But if they know where we are,” Ben says, “why isn't the Commission here already?”

“Exactly,” Five says. “So they don't know. The only other person to have seen our guy is Allison, right?”

“Why’s that relevant?” Luther says.

“Because, like Klaus, she's a powerful psychic.”

“Hold up, hold the phone,” Klaus says, holding his palms up. “I am not psychic. Neither is Allison, and besides, we’re not even particualrly similar, powers-wise—”

“What?” Five says, “You all think she uses magic words? No. The rumour thing is just a trigger phrase to focus her intent. She's an active telepath, she transmits one-to-one.” He wags a finger at Klaus. “Whereas you have more of a two-way radio.”

“That isn’t how my powers work,” Klaus says, wrinkling his nose. “Anyway, that stupid test with the cards that Dad made us do? I sucked at it.”

“Well,” Five says, “That would be because Zener cards are practically useless for gauging psychic ability.”

“But I don’t … psychically communicate with people. Or I’d tell you to quit snoring on the couch at 2am.”

“I do not snore,” Five says.

“It's snuffly,” Ben says. “Like a little dog or something.” Five gives him a look of dignified disapproval. Ben doesn’t weigh in on the “psychic or not” debate, mostly because he’s pretty sure Five’s right.

“But how's he doing it?” Luther says. “The wolf man can get to the cabin, only he’s invisible, and he can get into Klaus’s head?”

“He's conjuring you,” Five says to Klaus.

Klaus sits up in his seat. “What the fuck? That's … delightful.”

“He doesn’t know where we are, physically. But he can hitch a ride on you. Maybe Allison too. Not so sure about the rest of us.”

Luther says, “Could he be here right now?”

Ben looks around. Klaus catches his eye and shrugs.

“Best way to get a lock on him could be the lucid dreaming,” Five says. “I’m speculating.”

“Fun,” Klaus says, holding up his injured arm. “Excited to get right on that.”

“How can he hurt people in real life?” Ben says. “I don’t get it.”

“Theoretically? Quantum entanglement,” Five says with a worrying glint in his eye. “The physical properties of two particles or systems are interconnected, even if they’re in separate places. Kind of like how a consciousness can be present as information even though its material component remains elsewhere in spacetime.” He grins at Ben. “It’s a smart application, I gotta give them that.”

Klaus groans.

“Wait,” Luther says. “Are you saying that time travel, this astral thing, Klaus’s dreams and … ghosts are all, like, the same thing?”

“Yes,” Five says. “And also no.”

“What about hurting ghosts?” Luther says. “Is that a quantum thing?”

Klaus puts his head on the table. “Quantum, quantum, quantum. I feel like I’m done with today, anyone else feel like that?”

“One, two, quantum Freddy’s coming for you,” Ben sings.

“Three, four, fuck off you're not helping,” Klaus replies.

“I need to think,” Five says, standing up. His regular exit line. He turns away—then back to Ben. “What are you reading?”

Ben pulls the fat paperback from his pocket and flashes the cover at Five: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipeligo.

“Different from yesterday,” Five says.

“Yeah,” Ben says. “I finished the Le Guin. It was pretty good.”

“It's amazing, isn't it?” Luther says, suddenly bouncy. “If you like that you should try Philip K. Dick, Radio Free Albemuth. I think you'd dig it.”

“Maybe later. I think I need a break from apocalypse novels right now,” Ben says. “Sticking with fun times in a Siberian prison camp.”

“One thing I can’t figure out,” Five says, wagging a finger at Ben. “Where d’you get the books?”

Ben just winks at Five. He loves getting to not tell people this, particularly people who aren't dead and will therefore be extra baffled. Klaus, who knew it was coming, looks down and smiles.

Five looks to one side, and Ben sees the change of subject coming. Oh no. “Ben,” he says, hands in his pockets, face tight. “I didn’t get a chance before. I just wanted to say … I’m sorry it didn’t work out. I wish it had.”

Ben shrugs easily. “It’s cool,” he says. Because what else do you say? “I wasn’t the mission anyway.” He regrets saying it instantly, because in the moment before Five blinks away, Ben catches the look on his face.

Five leaves a lingering, uncomfortable silence. Ben, disinclined to participate in it, pulls his book out and starts reading. He knows Luther was opening his mouth to say something, and it was going to be an awkward something, and then Ben was going to have to say something else in return. Nope.

“Well,” Luther says, “I’m going to check the plumbing’s all still working.” He exhales. “Better than bumming around, right?”

“I hear ya,” Klaus says.

“Can I ask you something?” Luther says to Klaus as he stands. Klaus nods. “Theoretically,” he says, “do you think you’d be able to conjure Pogo? I mean, I know he wasn’t human, but. He was a person. He had a soul, right?”

“I’ve never tried,” Klaus says. “I mean I’ve never—I see people, I see humans, but maybe that’s just how I work.”

“Pogo was a person,” Ben says. Pogo was easily enough of a conflicted mess to qualify as human, he wants to say, but he has the sense not to.

“I can try,” Klaus says. “You want me to try now?”

“No,” Luther says. “Not here. The last thing he'd want to see is the amount of shit we’re all in right now. He deserves some peace.”

“I’m pretty sure he'd take it over fist fights at Dad’s funeral and Klaus stealing the silverware,” Ben says.

“You were there for that?” Luther says. “Oh god.”

“Don't worry, dude,” Ben says, “you did me a favour. I hated that statue. Doesn't even look like me.”

 

***

Diego spends his whole hour on watch thinking about doing that thing he's been wondering about. The thought makes him nervous as shit, and it makes his heart hurt. What if it doesn't go so great? What if he can't hold it together after? After all, he’s been holding it together, one foot in front of the other, for a good long while now. He knows that won't last forever, but, well, right now it seems like there's a good chance he’ll get himself killed before that particular chicken comes home to roost. And in the meantime, they've got shit to get done here. What if this knocks him down?

On the other hand, if you don’t know if there's gonna be a tomorrow, better get your shit in order today.

After he swaps off watch with Allison, he’s still antsy and churned up about it all, so he heads to the room he’s sharing with Luther. He finds it blissfully empty. There’s just enough floor room to drop and do some push-ups, so he does that for as many reps as he can handle, swaps to squats, then does pull-ups on the doorframe and manages five before part of it snaps off and gives him a splinter. He curses, then sits on the edge of the bed, checking out the long skinny needle of wood jammed into the side of his index finger. He’s still thinking about that thing. He pulls the splinter out by the end, and of course half of it stays put. He digs the rest out with the tip of his stiletto blade, and his fingers jitter and he nearly slices himself.

That’s when he knows for sure he's just gotta do this thing right now, do it before he gets himself even more distracted and jumpy and off his game.

Diego barrels through the living room, head down, narrowly missing Five, and out onto the back porch. He shuts the door behind him.

Klaus is sitting upright in the middle of the hammock with his feet on a chair, because he’s never met a piece of furniture he can’t sit on wrong. He looks up from his cowboy paperback at the sound of the door shutting, raises his eyebrows at Diego.

The silence gives Diego the sinking feeling that Klaus has a good idea what he's going to say, and is going to make him say it anyway.

“So,” Diego says.

“Hi, bro,” Klaus says. “What brings you out here on this lovely spring afternoon?”

Diego gives him a look. Klaus looks blandly back, giving him nothing.

“What happened to your arm?” Diego says, gesturing at the dressings.

“Wrestled a bat,” Klaus says, turning a page. “Thanks for the reading matter. Slight smell of damp on the pages, also suspect these cowboys aren't gonna deliver on the rampant sexual tension, better than nothing.”

“Thank Five,” Diego says. “He was poking through that box of books when I went on watch.”

“Hmm,” Klaus says. He straightens his legs, swings himself back on the chair. “ _’You wanna try firing my gun?’ says Cowboy One. ‘I’d really like to take a look at yours too, if you like.’_ ” He's dropped his voice an octave and there's some kind of bad Texas accent being attempted. “ _’Boy, that's some nice action.’_ Something something long barrel, now they're talking about gun oil, it's like a single entendre. You want this once I’m done?”

“I'm good, thanks,” Diego says. “Idiots need to make up their minds already.”

“They have a hundred twenty-eight pages left to get it together and turn this into a spicy romp,” Klaus says, “I’ll let you know.”

“So,” Diego says.

Klaus turns a page. He's gonna make Diego say it, isn’t he?

Diego rolls his eyes, resigns himself, and starts talking. “So, I nearly died yesterday.” Klaus lifts his head, attention caught. “Yeah. Trapped under the cookie aisle with one of those Commission assholes about to pop a couple caps in my head.” He shakes his head. “Vanya saved me. Day before that it was you saving me, and then you nearly checked out right in front of me.”

“Guess you're gonna have to move us both up the old league table, huh?”

“Yep,” Diego says. He can see Klaus assessing his suspicious lack of shit-talk. “Look,” he says, “what I mean is, there’s gonna be more where that came from, right?”

Klaus shrugs. “Another day, another assassin.”

“Yeah, but—we solve this problem, we lick our wounds and get away again—shit is just gonna keep coming, isn’t it?”

Another shrug. Klaus says, softly, “Looks like.”

“This whole Commission deal … we really bit off more than we can chew. I’ve been thinking.”

“You know it’s asking far too much for me not to take that opener?” Klaus’s voice is still low and soft. “Like “I can hear the grinding noises,” that’s the low-hanging fruit, “I thought you looked kinda constipated,” or—”

“I’ve been thinking we’re not all gonna make it through this.”

“Oh,” Klaus says. “That. Yeah. Maybe.” He does the Bambi eyes thing at Diego, gives a sad little lop-sided smile. No surprise in him, like he’s already been there in his head. Diego feels weird and not so comfy about that for half a dozen reasons.

“Point is,” Diego says, “I’ve had enough close calls to get the universe is sending me a memo. If there’s something important I wanna do, it better be now.”

Klaus grins. “So you want me to call Dad so we can tell him to fuck off a few more times?”

Diego presses his lips together, swallows. “You know who I want you to call.”

“Okay,” Klaus says. His voice is soft, his look clear and direct.

“What, that’s it?” Diego darts his eyes around, as if Patch—yeah, Patch, he can say it—is going to pop up sitting on the railing. “So, uh, when …?”

“Now?” Klaus says. Diego sucks in a breath. “What, you doing anything? Might as well carpe the diem.”

“Do you need me to get you anything, or?”

“Two Baby Ruth bars from your stash you think no one knows about,” Klaus says, not even skipping a beat.

“Is that like payment, or loading up your blood sugar?”

“Both,” Klaus says. “Neither.” He grins, holds up a handful of empty candy wrappers. “Found your stash this morning, only now you can’t noogy me for it.”

Diego shakes his head. “Prick.” Okay. So. He looks at himself, brushes himself down. “Now, right? Do I look okay?”

Klaus looks him up and down, gives him an A-OK sign. “Wait. Your hair, you got a little bit—” He gestures at his own head. Diego pats his hair, feeling for whatever it is. “Just c’mere, I’ll get it.”

“You better not be messing with me,” Diego says, cautiously getting himself within touching distance.

Klaus ignores him, rearranges Diego’s hair on the left, gives it a quick fingertip brush. “There,” he says. “You’ll do.”

“Okay,” Diego says. He steps back. “Now what?”

“Now, you stop talking.”

Diego stops. Instead he paces, up and down, glancing at Klaus out of the corners of his eyes. Klaus doesn’t seem to be actually, y’know, doing anything. He’s not chanting or talking or going into a trance or anything like that. He’s just sitting there quietly, looking idly around him. Is he doing it yet? Last time Diego remembers him being able to conjure anyone at will was when they were like, sixteen, before Ben and before the drugs got too bad. The spirits just seemed to show up back then, and mostly it was only Klaus who saw them. Diego remembers just one time he made someone visible, a murdered hostage, hardly more than a rippling shadow with a hole in her temple and sad, scared eyes.

Klaus is looking down at his hands. He scratches at his wrist, puts one hand on his cheek, sighs and looks off to one side.

“Are you doing this, yet?” Diego says. “Because if you need to jitter around for ten minutes first, I’m gonna take a walk.”

“Diego,” says someone just behind him.

His throat closes all the way and his heart just straight up wrenches, like someone shoved a hand into his chest and gave it a good squeeze.

He gives himself a whole second to get it together and set his face, and then he turns around and looks at Patch.

She looks—he doesn’t know what he was expecting—she just looks just solid and real and normal, no blue light or glitching or creepy monochrome, like nothing is wrong and she never went anywhere. She’s wearing the outfit she wore that day, the one he found her in, with her badge and the little brown leather jacket and those boring-ass work slacks her butt looked great in. That ugly red wet exit wound is there, big and bloody and right over her heart. But she doesn’t look in pain, or even sad or faded. She just looks like Eudora Patch. She’s smiling at him, that steady tolerant Patch smile she gave him when he was low-level bugging her but this time she didn’t mind so much because she got that it was a big deal thing, like he showed up again on her stoop, or rang the doorbell too late at night after a job went bad.

“Hey,” he says, already hearing his voice start to crack. “Hey, Eudora.”

“How’ve you been, Diego?” she says, and it sounds warm and amused, and like she’s laughing at him but in a nice way, like _what did you get yourself into this time?_

“Been good,” he says. “Y’know, saved the world, shit like that.” It’d probably sound better if his voice wasn’t cracking.

She nods at him, grins, raises her eyebrows.

“What?” he says. He’s dropped right back into the rhythm of them, like it’s just another conversation. “Y’know a lot of people would be, little more impressed, little less _cool story, bro_.”

“I can confirm his part in the world-saving,” Klaus says. “I mean, we know he’s prone to drama but, that definitely happened. People are trying to un-happen it, but.”

“Can you stop helping?” Diego says. “How about you?” he says, turning back to Patch. “You look good. Is it okay, where you are? Is it, it’s like the good place, right?”

That gets him a proper Patch eyeroll, like he straight up tried to take a case file off her desk. “ _Diego_ ,” she says.

“Give it up,” Klaus says. “When they know, they never tell. Trust me, if they did I’d have gotten the meaning of life by the age of eight.”

Patch grins. “He’s not wrong. I’m good, Diego. Okay? You don’t have to worry about me.”

“But it shouldn’t have happened,” Diego says. The corners of his eyes are prickling suspiciously. “It wasn’t your time.”

Patch shrugs. “Maybe not. But it was my job.”

“Listen, I beat hell out of the asshole who did it,” Diego says. “The bunny mask lady, yeah? I mean, she was a stone cold killer and strong as fuck, I didn’t like, _beat_ her, it was an even match, which I won, and y’know, sexual equality.” God, he had a whole speech prepared and all but now he's forgotten it all, he doesn't even know what's coming out his mouth.

“Okay,” she says.

“But I didn’t kill her,” Diego says. “Thought you wouldn’t like that.”

“Okay,” she says.

Diego has the sudden intiution he didn’t just grant her spirit eternal peace. She seems kind of—overly chill? “Was it bothering you?” he says. “I mean, me, that’d bug the hell out of me. Killer at large, and justice undone and all.”

“No,” Patch says, simply. “I’m really glad you stopped her. That's good. I appreciate it. But I'm okay.”

“Why?” he says. He can’t square it. This is not going how it went in his head.

“Well,” she says, “You know. Not really my thing? I didn’t become a detective to get into the revenge business, I wanted to help people.”

“Oh,” Diego says, “yeah.” He’s starting to get it, and it’s making his throat go tight.

“Sure,” Patch says, “I wanted to put away the assholes, but not because I thought they deserved my sweat. The non-assholes are the ones you sweat for, yeah? Keeping people safe. Helping them out. Letting them sleep at night. Saving lives. To protect and serve, y’know?”

Diego nods. The pressure on his throat is worse, and his eyes sting, and he’s trying not to blink.

“I really liked it,” Patch says. She sounds almost nostalgic. “My job. Worse ways to go out, you know?”

With that, Diego’s dignity is officially heading down the crapper. The tears start and he puts a hand over his eyes, rubs his face and nods and tries to breathe even and open up his throat enough to talk. Because that’s so fucking Patch, y’know? Of course she sees it like that. Of course she dies in the line of duty and another human being is alive because of her, and she’s good with that.

“Thank you for saving my brother,” he manages, stilted.

Klaus nods at her and smiles too, and Patch smiles back at Klaus, but—it’s weirdly like they already had that talk. With a little jolt of shock, Diego realises they _have_ had that talk.

“And you’re good? Really?”

“I’m good,” Patch says. “Really. what about you?”

“I'm cool,” Diego says. “I mean, I'm maybe not the most cool I've ever been. Turns out the guys who killed you? Part of some huge-ass organisation of cosmic gangsters or something, and we, I mean my family, we stopped them pulling some major shit, but now they're on our asses.”

“Wait, you're working with your family? As in the Academy?”

“Yeah,” Diego says, “kind of, yeah. All of us. I know.”

“Wow,” Patch says. For the first time, she looks a little thrown, maybe even a little impressed. “That's good. I mean, knowing you, if you all worked together long enough to get shit done, that’s—well, that’s a lot.”

Diego snorts and ducks his head. “And our reward for being semi-functional adults is this bunch of assholes has kinda declared war.”

Patch wrinkles her nose, smiles warmly. “Yeah,” she says. “I think that's generally the reward for pissing off big gangs of bad guys. You get their attention.”

“They're big, Patch. This organisation, they're—I can't even describe it, but they're big, and weird, and they've got connections and hardware like you've never seen.”

“I saw,” she says. “I was working the case, remember?”

“Well … it gets so much weirder. Truth is, I dunno how it's all gonna pan out. So I just wanted to check in with you now rather than putting it off, you know?”

She nods. This part, he can see, she really gets.

“I'm glad you're good, Eudora. It's a weight off, you know?” He takes a breath. He can't say it. He doesn't know how to haul out what's in his heart and turn it into words. He loves her so much, and that's how much it hurts. He doesn't even know if he admitted to himself he was still in love with her, not really, not until right now. It's all way too late. Last thing she needs in her eternal rest is her ex coming on too strong.

“Is there anything I can do for you, like at this end?” he says. “Like, pass on a message, take care of something? Get your plants watered?”

“Yeah.” Patch smiles more easily. “There’s definitely something important you can take care of for me, Diego.”

“Anything, y’know. Name it.”

“Look after yourself,” she says. Real quietly, smiling, looking into his eyes. “I know. Cosmic gangster war, but still. You can take better care of yourself, Diego. That’s what you can do for me.”

And it’s all love, in her face, and it’s so fucking sweet. It doesn’t even matter what kind of love. All of a sudden it hardly seems to matter any more that they didn’t work, or he couldn’t impress her, or that she’s kind of been lowkey shaking her head at him the whole time. All that matters is that they’re that connected, and now they always will be, because she took the love with her, wherever she went.

He can’t speak. But he doesn’t know what he’d even say, so maybe it’s okay anyway. He’s streaming tears now, no point even trying.

Patch takes two steps towards him, and she puts her hand up, and her smile is so sweet and so bright and so real, and she touches his face. She cups his cheek with her hand, and the press of her fingertips is warm, and if he wasn’t already finished off then that did it. He takes a good, long look at her, and he sucks a breath in, and he closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to watch her fade away. He wants to feel like she’s still there, always, like she’s right around the corner.

Her hand isn’t there any more, and there’s a breeze in the trees, and he opens his eyes and, of course, he’s alone.

Not quite alone: Klaus has his book up in front of his face, making a whole big deal of how he’s just reading his novel and not watching Diego have a breakdown on the porch. He’s shaking out his other hand and trying to be subtle about it, but Diego caught the fading blue flare at his fingertips. Klaus did that, the sap. He let Patch touch Diego’s cheek. God. He can steal all the Baby Ruth bars he likes. He’s got an endless reprieve from Diego giving him shit, or maybe at least a day or two. He let them talk. He let her touch his cheek.

“I’m gonna take a walk,” Diego manages, stumbling down the stairs. “Go check out the perimeter, you know. If we had one. Maybe we should get one or something.”

He looks back. Klaus nods without looking up, still staring into his book, only from down here Diego can see his face. If it’s not too on the nose to say so, he looks fucking haunted. It’s the look of a man dealing with enough of his own shit. Diego was wondering, before this, if Klaus had managed to conjure his guy or not yet. Now he’s pretty sure he knows the answer from the stricken look on Klaus’ face.

“Thank you,” Diego says. Then he turns and walks briskly into the forest to spare them both from the conversation, and he doesn’t stop until he’s deep in enough that no one but the birds will hear when he lets it all go.

 

***

Allison’s head still hurts: that sharp cold aching sting behind her eyes, the ice-cream headache, as she always called it to herself, that hits every so often when she doesn’t use her powers. Which she doesn’t: not any more. It has ebbed and flowed all day, but it never truly went away: not through that disaster of a meeting, not afterwards with the house awash in grief and tension, certainly not when the plumbing started coughing sewage over the house. So of course when she goes on watch, the headache comes with her.

She walks slowly round the cabin, carrying the assault rifle Five insists upon across her body, tipped low. She’s not fond of the rifle. Dad made them do firearms training, mostly so they could deal with bad guys’ weapons, but she had no desire to retain it. She’s pretty sure she wouldn’t remember a single thing about how to handle a gun if it hadn’t been for eager-beaver directors getting her out on the range to train for roles. Even so, as she started out on her first watch yesterday, Klaus motioned her over to the couch he was lying on and silently adjusted her hands on the rifle. He showed her how to round her shoulder in if she had to fire and where to brace it below the middle of her collarbone to absorb the recoil, and neither of them commented upon the fact that he knew exactly what he was doing. Then he rolled over and went straight back to sleep.

Back when Allison was a kid, Dad could spot the headache a mile off. He’d march her off to go “discharge” it, which usually meant rumouring someone to order. Pogo, their Spanish tutor, the TV repairman: Dad wasn’t picky, as long as she was doing exactly what he told her. She always felt so gross after. Dad liked to know he was in control of her powers; she thinks even back then she knew that she scared him.

Later on, once they were going out on missions, once she’d started realising that there was a big thrilling world around her and a lot of stuff in it she could control, she was using her powers so regularly that the headaches never hit. So she never learnt to manage them: not the headaches and definitely not the powers. Story of all their lives, she guesses: Dad controlled how they controlled themselves, so they never learnt how, and then out on their own, it was sink or swim. Currently, it’s only actually killed one out of the seven of them.

It’s late afternoon now, and the sun has gone in; the spring evening chill is getting an early start. This far north, and at altitude too, it’s freezing at night. At least now they have blankets and sweaters. She used to miss the snow occasionally in LA, in a sort of pointless recreational nostalgia way, but never the chill.

They all seem to follow the same circuit on watch, although of course, them being them, no one’s discussed it. Around the edge of the clearing where the cabin stands. By the big garbage can at the property’s edge, past the path that leads down to the lake, close in where the house backs close onto the woods, out again by the porch, and along the edge of the darkening woods. Repeat.

No one else has seen that hiker who waved at her yesterday, or anyone else. That’s a good thing, if she looks at it rationally.

She’s past the lake when something she can’t pin down itches at her. Her head pangs. She stops for a moment, automatically wary. That vigilance never left her; nor did the training, so ingrained as to be instinctual, to trust her gut and check out the vaguest sense that something wasn’t right.

It takes her a moment, then she realises: the woods are quiet here. She can hear the breeze in the trees, the rustling of branches; but that’s all. No birds, no insects. She tries to recall if she could hear birds before. How should she know? Maybe they’re quiet this time of day. Maybe they all like to take a late siesta.

Her head pangs; the back of her neck prickles.

As she comes up behind the porch, she hears Klaus’ voice. “Hey there,” she catches, “you around?” Oh, Ben. She can wave hello if he's about. The thought warms her up. Then, as she rounds the corner, she hears, “Now would be peachy, you know?” and Klaus’ voice cracks halfway through.

No, not Ben. She freezes. Klaus says softly, “Or not. I miss you.” The breath he sucks in shudders audibly. “I miss you so fucking much.” Allison’s stomach twists. Not Ben. She’s walked in on him conjuring someone, and it’s not working, and he sounds heartbroken, and the rest she can guess.

“Come home,” she hears Klaus say, almost a whisper, and the longing in it goes right to her core, makes her eyes sting. “Come home, baby.”

She listens to Klaus, hears him getting his breathing back under control. She can't round the corner now; and she can’t give her presence away. This is a private moment, and she shouldn’t be here. She winces. There's a long silence, then Klaus says, “Okay. I’ll be okay. I’ll be fine.” He doesn’t sound fine. He pauses to breathe again. “Same time tomorrow? Oh, who am I kidding? First thing tomorrow morning.”

She was about to back up to give Klaus some time; now she’s the one who needs a minute to pull herself together. She sucks in breath through her nose, tries to get the air deep down in her lungs. She steps back, turns around, walks quietly back into the woods on the balls of her feet.

 _I miss you so fucking much._ She feels that, right in her chest. She imagines Claire in her arms, sat on her hip with her arms round Allison’s neck, close enough for Allison to kiss her forehead. It hurts. She thinks about Klaus: he’s never talked about it to her, but she heard it from the others, back in 2003, and more to the point, the whole story is written in the ways he’s changed. He fought; he loved someone. He lost him, and looked for him, and never found him. That’s what really loving someone is, isn’t it? You can tell from the pain.

Her headache pangs again. She puts a hand over her eyes and lets herself cry a little, as quiet as she can.

She doesn’t realise until she rubs her eyes and checks her watch: she’s back in the silent patch of woods. The wind through the trees sounds rhythmic, like a tide, like breathing.

Enough time. She pulls her powder compact out of her jacket, checks her eyes and pats on a little powder. Cry-face acceptably concealed, especially given Klaus has other things to be thinking about.

“Hey,” she says as she rounds the corner, treading loud and firm to give him a little extra warning. Klaus is sitting on the porch steps with his paperback. He gives her a perky little wave and a flash of grin.

Allison, too, can fake a good smile. “How are the cowboys?” she calls.

“Ugh, they’re bores,” Klaus says, in that light and chipper voice he uses when he’s bullshitting hard. “Any more sublimation of eroticism into punching and I might have to swap you for the cookbook. Toxic masculinity is a helluva drug.”

“I hear ya,” Allison says. She moves on with a backwards wave.

As she walks, she tries to keep her mind on the present and off all the fears that watch is such a great opportunity to get lost within. The insects and the birds have started up again. She wonders why they quieted down in the first place.

She distracts herself with lists and calculations as she walks. How long would it take them to get to the Canadian border from here? Yeah, because that’d make such a huge difference to the time-travelling CIA over there. _Oh, sorry, you’re in Canada now. We’ll respect that._ She smiles to herself and rolls her eyes. How about: what’s the plan for tomorrow? What’s the plan at all, she might add. Here’s a plan: they all lean on Five and get him to spill everything he knows. Enough cryptic crap and “I need to think”. She wants it all out on the table, no matter how bad it is.

She looks around her. It’s beautiful out here. The soft green light of the woods, the fresh pine smell, the lake, the glimpses of rolling mountains above the trees. In other circumstances, you could have a fantastic weekend away here—you could grill, hike, go fishing. You could drink wine round the fire and make s’mores. You could not get drilled full of bullet holes by assassins in freaky gas masks so they can restart the apocalypse. Really blow away some cobwebs. She wonders if this is how Klaus felt sometimes. She went to Vietnam with Patrick on vacation once, after they were married but before Claire. She’d visited a bunch of awesome street markets and temples, gone hiking in Phu Quoc National Park, logged some spectacular beach time with no paparazzi and eaten the best pho she’d ever had in her life. She’s not sure what the moral of this story is. The mountains are beautiful. Fuck.

She doesn’t notice that the woods are silent again until she’s wandered right into them, further off the usual path than she meant to go. She looks around her, drinks in the eerie quiet of it—then she looks back to the cabin.

She’s in the exact same spot as she was last time she noticed the silence: that one patch of woods close to the rear of the cabin.

She does the smart thing: tells her brain to shut up already and carries on walking, brisker than her usual pace, out into the clearing.

The third time, as she circles the cabin, that Allison comes up on that same patch of woods, she finds her shoulders tensing and her fingers gripping the rifle a little tighter. Her head throbs. Irritated with herself, she consciously relaxes, tries to shake it off.

As her path leads her up to the woods’ edge, this time she notices the birdsong dying. It fades out evenly, almost like someone turned down the volume dial. Allison takes a few paces backwards into the clearing. The birdsong fades back in. That's odd. Maybe there is some kind of animal hiding back there. Or maybe it’s a spirit, she thinks, like that gangster Klaus spoke to, the one Five killed. She doesn’t love the idea that she’s walking through a ghost, but it’s oddly reassuring: something that can be confirmed, categorised, checked out as harmless.

The wind breathes loud through the trees here; almost an animal noise, thick and panting. She doesn't love that, either. Are there bears in these mountains?

Klaus is up on watch next; maybe she should just ask him to check it out? He’s been, uncharacteristically—but she thinks she gets it—bugging everyone for things to do, which is how he ended up on the watch rota despite the injury.

“Hey, Klaus,” she says, jogging towards him as she passes so he won’t have to try to yell. “There’s like a weird quiet spot in the woods back there, is that your ghost gangster?”

Klaus is calm now, staring at his paperback with his elbow propped up on one knee, leaning his cheek in his hand. He tilts his head and shrugs. “No clue, but I’ll take a look.” He sighs. “Company’d be nice. Mikey’s quite the chatterbox.” He looks off to one side, his mood suddenly dipping for some reason. “I was meaning to look for him anyway, see if he’s all good in the hood …” He sighs, scratches nervously at the back of one hand. Then it’s gone and he puts on a smile, gives Allison a theatrical spiralling wave of his hand as she passes.

Nearly time to hand off watch: this is her final lap round the cabin. Past the rear porch, she veers away from the building, crosses again the rough path down to the lake, then heads up the little hill that leads her closer to the side of the house. Something catches her attention—movement—and she turns to the the living room window, looking to see who’s inside, and meets the eyes of her own reflection.

And something is moving behind her. She catches a long snout, something hunched above her, looming—Allison spins round, raising her rifle, ready to draw a bead on this—possum?

Opposite the window, a few yards back from where she saw the face, is a large possum, sitting on top of the cabin’s half-closed garbage can. It's holding a tangle of ramen in its creepy little human hands.

Allison lets out a breath. She pinches the bridge of her own nose. She thinks for a moment about the warm breath she felt, imagined feeling, on the back of her own neck as she turned.

The possum takes another big chomping bite of noodles. It chews them slowly, then turns its head to look at Allison. It seems entirely unconcerned by her. Human? Whatever. Human pointing an assault rifle at me? What's that pointy tube stick, a noodle dispenser?

It hits her: someone’s been feeding this little bugger.

 

***

“I need you to conjure someone for me,” Five says.

Klaus, sitting cross-legged on the porch floor with his back resting against against a column, looks up from the paperback he's staring a hole through. Honestly, he doesn't look so hot: he’s pale and a little sweaty, his eyes are tired and puffy looking. “Oh, sure,” Klaus says. “Sure, why not, eh? What it is to be in high demand.”

Five assesses him for a moment, then crouches down and tries to move Klaus’ shirt aside to look at his chest. Klaus bats his hand away; Five eyeballs him and goes back in, shifts Klaus’ army shirt to one side and lifts his loose, garish tie-dye tank—a Walmart purchase of Vanya’s to replace the shirt Five had had to cut off him back in the Academy infirmary. “Breathe,” Five says. “Deeper.”

“Deep is a no-no,” Klaus says. He winces as he pulls in a deeper breath, then relaxes on the exhale. “My lung’s being very vindictive about this whole thing.”

Klaus’ chest is rising and falling evenly, though. Doesn’t look like his left lung’s compressed. He’s healing. Fortunate, and a relief: Five has his limits as a medic. “You should be taking full normal breaths,” he says. “Does the Advil do much?”

“Not really,” Klaus says, a weary little sing-song. Five still finds the changes in him a little hard to grasp: not so much the exponential growth of his powers as the sobriety, the weight of sadness about him, the occasional capacity to be actually quiet. “Which lucky dead person do you need to talk to?”

“It's important, Klaus,” Five says. He doesn’t do tangential; nobody in his family ever seems to get that.

“Yeah, yeah,” Klaus says, letting his head drop back against the porch upright. “It always is.”

“You can be pissed at me later,” Five says, “after we survive this.”

“I'm not pissed,” Klaus says, looking him in the eye. It's unexpectedly plain and sincere, and that makes Five feel a little thrown. “Who?”

“My old boss,” Five says.

“Ben wants to know if you killed her,” Klaus says.

Five rolls his eyes. “No, Ben, I didn’t.” He feels suddenly exposed; he had no idea Ben was here. Ben’s survival was tangential, wasn’t it? And Five doesn’t do tangential. _I wasn’t the mission._

Five stands, puts his hands in his pockets, feeling the need to pace a little as he explains. “I don't know what happened to her,” he says. “But I do know she isn't overseeing the apocalypse case any more. All this experimental crap: the bespoke weapons, a surgically altered bespoke assassin … she never gives the Metaphysics department this much rope, and she hates to make this much noise. It’s all far too baroque for her; she liked a surgically precise removal. Therefore, she's no longer in post.”

“No chance she got a nice retirement package? Took a vacation?”

“No chance,” Five says shortly. “Not in the middle of things like this. Something happened to her.”

Klaus pauses, fixing his eyes somewhere over Five’s shoulder. “Don’t be mean, Ben,” he says, “I think they sound like delightful employers, how’s their dental plan?”

“Not bad,” Five says. “But yes. It’s not unknown for the Commission to order an internal removal, when the stakes are high enough.”

“Didn’t you leave the Commission kind of on a bum note?” Klaus says. “You think she'd still want to talk to you?” His eyes slide to the side. “ _Oh._. The Commission wasted her, so you think she might be up for ratting them out from the afterlife?”

Five shrugs. “She loves to talk. I was hoping to appeal to her vanity.”

“Okay,” Klaus says, eyes half-closed. “Let’s give it a whirl. Name?”

“The Handler.”

Klaus snorts. “Little awkward on a birthday card, but okay. Did they ever manage to give you a stupid code name?”

“Of course not,” Five says.

“Of course not,” Klaus says, the corners of his mouth lifting in a tired smile.

There's a long silence. Five watches Klaus closely, starting to wonder if he's gone to sleep. “Any results?”

“She's not picking up,” Klaus says. He sighs, still looking vaguely ahead of him. “So, were you guys buds?”

“She was obsessive, she was highly manipulative, and she had terrible personal boundaries,” Five says. “Also I betrayed her organisation, sabotaged the home office, and blew her up with a grenade.” Off Klaus’ look, he adds, “she got better.”

“All right,” Klaus says, “okay. Based on that, is there maybe a teensy chance she's leaving you to stew in your own juice?”

“Entirely plausible,” Five says, closing his eyes. Well, there goes his only useful line of enquiry. His stomach clenches, and the dread starts to press down upon him again. He shrugs it off.

He opens his eyes again when he hears boots coming up the porch steps. Allison’s tread.

Allison says, “Klaus, you’re up for watch. Also, guys, FYI, there is a really big possum sitting on top of the garbage can.”

“Oh, Jeff?” Klaus says. “Yeah, he likes to watch the sunset there.”

“ _Jeff_?” Allison says with a dangerous edge to her voice. She folds her arms.

“Yeah, yeah,” Klaus says, oblivious or ignoring her. “He looks like a Jeff. Right?”

“Klaus.” Allison narrows her eyes at him. “If you have been feeding that possum, so help me—you better not.”

Klaus claps a hand to his chest dramatically and makes his mouth an ‘o’, his best “who, _me_?”

“Five?”

Five folds his arms. Classic family tangential bullshit. “I think we have more important concerns right now, don’t you?”

Allison shrugs. “We’re sitting on our asses reading mouldy paperbacks.”

“Exactly,” Five says. “We need to construct a defence plan. I rigged up some basic tripwires last night. We need to set them up before we lose the light.”

Klaus is painfully climbing to his feet, back braced against the porch upright. “Oh,” he says. “So that was your little 3am craft project.”

Allison wrinkles her nose at Five. “Did you sleep last night?”

“Can we focus, please?” Five says. He didn't sleep much, and talking about it is another entirely unnecessary tangent. They have plenty of coffee and sugar. He's had worse.

Klaus limps over and takes the assault rifle Allison was gingerly holding. She exhales as she lets it go, and her shoulders relax a little. “I don't love carrying that around,” she says.

“Me either,” Klaus says. “They stick.”

“I didn't see anyone else packing a weapons cache,” Five says.

Klaus shrugs easily, tilts his head at them and starts slowly down the stairs.

 _Jeff_ , Five thinks idly. Not a bad name. He’s gotten to like that possum. He’s a good listener, and he’s been very appreciative of the breadsticks.

 

***

Five’s laid a tripwire alarm perimeter plenty of times by himself, of course. He used to do it round camp, so often that every motion of making the fuses and setting up the wire is automatic to him. Dolores tended to restrict her contributions to critique. He used to improvise a lot, in terms of materials. It feels positively luxurious to be making these things with ready-made firecrackers and whatever else he needed to buy from a lavishly-stocked store the size of a city block. His only previous encounters with Walmarts had been scavenging through rubble that used to be one for anything useful. It was kind of overwhelming, thrilling really, to see one in its intact state: like walking round Pompeii before the volcano. Ironic that he got to leave it caving in and on fire.

He supposes even now, he’s mostly a citizen of the apocalypse. After a while, he needed to set the perimeter tripwire to sleep at night, even if they were camped somewhere outside the spreading habitats of the big predator animals. Dolores used to tease him about it.

The agents might blink in inside the perimeter. But maybe they’ll be combing the area. It gives them a shot at getting a little early warning if they’re made, anyway.

Or maybe Five just needs this to be able to sleep. Wouldn’t that be ridiculous?

“C’mon,” Five says to Luther, “we need to get this tripwire installed around the perimeter before it gets dark. Hell of a lot easier with two people.”

From his perch, hunched over in the chair in the corner of the living room, Luther looks up at him with red-rimmed eyes. Five immediately realises this is not going to go well.

“Not now,” Luther says, slow and measured with an undertone of trouble. “Find someone else.”

“We don’t have time,” Five says. “I’m sorry.” Because he is. “But if we want to try and stop more of us from dying, if we want to keep the Commission from reversing what we did and bringing back the apocalypse … we need a plan of action.”

“You think tripwires are going to do it?” Luther says.

“We’re buying ourselves time.”

“Time for what?” Luther says.

Five suddenly feels needled, on edge. Damn. Why does he have to be the one to drag everyone off their butts every time? He shakes his head.

“So you don’t have a plan,” Luther says.

“So it’s my job to have a plan, Number One? Who’s supposed to be in charge, exactly?”

Luther exhales, sits up a little. “Well, not me. I think it’s pretty clear by now I suck at it.”

Five throws his hands up. He can feel his nerves scraping with aggravation. “We don’t have time for this,” he says.

Luther looks at him: steady, solid, drenched in grief. “Get Diego,” he says quietly. “Get someone else to go string twine between trees with you. I’d like to be alone.”

“Fine,” Five says. “We also need a defence plan for the cabin. You can do that alone. Possible entrances, escape routes, defence and fallback positions; usual drill.” Then he reconsiders. Perhaps he shouldn’t have said that; or maybe he should say something else too. Luther nods at Five. He looks miserable and pissed off, but he’s saying yes. Good. Maybe it’ll distract him too. It’s good to have something practical to do when you feel like crap, in his experience. “Okay,” Five says, and doesn’t risk more. He turns and blinks out.

Diego is laying on his bed. He’s absently twirling a thin blade in his hand, like a majorette’s baton. He, too, has very obviously recently been crying. It’s like a freaking epidemic. “Hey!” Diego says as Five blinks in. He points with the blade. “Fucking knock, okay?”

Five throws his hands up, turns, and blinks straight out again.

 

***

Vanya is not entirely sure what she’s supposed to do on watch duty; and she’s not about to ask her siblings. Her closest previous experience was standing guard while they all climbed out the fire escape for clandestine donuts, or bowling, or the movies. What everyone else seems to do on watch is wander round the circumference of the cabin for a couple of hours. So she does that. Five is mostly insisting whoever’s on watch take that huge assault rifle he tried to buy extras for in the Walmart. Vanya gets a pass on that, thank god, both for never having touched so much as a BB gun and for being able to smash people to paste with her mind. So that’s fun.

However much apocalypse she’s got in her, though, she’s painfully aware of that yawning gap of experience between her and the others. They had a whole childhood of training; she doesn’t know how the hell anything works. In the fight back at the Academy, she got side stitch running down five flights of stairs, while the others zipped ahead then, worse, hung back for her. Then after that, Vanya fell down a bunch of steps on her butt. She can’t run, she can’t throw a punch or duck one, and the moment she realised they were safely out of the city, she had a minor panic attack in the back of the van and Diego had to sit with her talking her through some goofy military breathing exercise, with Klaus lying right there next to them half-dead.

The parts in between all that, the parts she's good at, scare her even worse.

They don't eat together that night. There's enough stuff from yesterday’s groceries that everyone just wanders around helping themselves all day, which, given the mood, is probably a blessing.

Vanya and Allison make grilled cheese sandwiches some time before it gets dark. They sit out on the step of the back porch, and Allison offers to go through some Krav Maga basics with her tomorrow. Another helpful offer to chalk up. Five wants to show her how to shoot a gun (“just a .45 to start with”). Diego offered to repeat the basics of some self-defence class he taught which culminated in some woman (“even shorter than you!”) breaking his arm. Luther, who clearly noticed her panting her way down those stairs, thinks this trip is a great opportunity for Vanya to start going jogging.

Vanya walks around the cabin like she usually does, in the warm zippered hoodie and knit cap she picked up on their incredibly violent grocery run, vaguely looking out for hordes of masked bad dudes who don't show up. She keeps track of a chunky little possum who seems to like sneaking in and out of the big garbage can at the edge of the property. Must be exciting to suddenly have all this free food. She occasionally jumps when a twig snaps. She constructs an elaborate paranoid fantasy where she hears screams and noise, starts whiting out, and comes back to herself to find she's murdered a bunch of teenagers on a camping trip. (No time travel this time, no takebacks, no do-overs. You murdered them.)

After she hands off watch to Luther, it’s back to being at a loose end. So she practices. The photocopied sheet music to the Bach partita she played at her audition, the solo she was going to play at the concert, is still in the lid of her case. The associations of it make her a little nauseous. But below it is an older set of photocopied sheets, the creases soft from many folds. Another solo piece: ten minutes of challenging, spiralling baroque variations. She always meant to use it as an audition piece, but never quite got there. Well, now she’s got time.

The flow comes so much more easily to her now. She’s got no idea if it’s a powers thing, or maybe just not being on a buttload of antipsychotics. Maybe it doesn’t matter. She doesn't notice she's not alone until she finishes a run through and hears a rapping on her open bedroom door. She opens her eyes. It's Five. He's standing in the doorway, knuckles still raised to the door.

“That's a beautiful piece,” Five says. He smiles at her almost apologetically. “Baroque?”

Vanya rests her violin and bow on the table. “Yeah,” she says. “You know me. Heinrich Biber, the Passacaglia from the Rosary Sonatas. It’s one of the oldest solo violin pieces in the world. You ever make it to the seventeenth century?”

“Nah,” Five says softly. “If I had, I would have been sure to take in some chamber music in your honour.”

Vanya smiles, waiting for it. She knows there's a reason he's come up here.

“I could use your help,” Five says. He digs in the grocery bag he's holding and pulls out a paperclip with some kind of fuse and battery assembly glued to it. “Homemade tripwire fuses.”

Vanya frowns. “Like for a bomb?”

“For an alarm system,” Five says, “running in a perimeter round the cabin. Easier to set up with two people. Not that two people are easy to come by round here.”

“You sure you don't want one of the others?” Vanya says. “Luther’s good at the tech stuff.”

Five shakes his head. “Everyone else is being bizarre and preoccupied. You know the deal. Off dealing with their own shit, regardless of urgency.”

Vanya raises an eyebrow. “You notice I've also been kind of dealing with my own shit?”

Five sighs and smiles wryly. “I was hoping you might go a little easier on me.” He exhales, looks off to one side. “I know I should have said something, about Pogo,” he says, softly. “That’s on me.”

Vanya huffs a breath, shakes her head. Her chest is tight. “Well,” she says, “could be worse. At least _you_ didn’t murder him.”

“You didn’t either,” Five says. “The timeline—”

“Fuck the timeline,” Vanya says. “I did it. I just got a do-over, that’s all. Doesn’t mean I get to forget what I did.”

“Vanya,” Five says. He seems for once at a loss.

“Okay,” Vanya says, grabbing her hat. “Let’s go lay tripwires.”

Like everyone else, Five is full of helpful explanations. The clothes pegs have thumb tacks attached to fuses driven into the ends. When someone crosses the wire, the plastic tag the clothes peg’s holding gets pulled out, the circuit closes and, powered by the battery, the fuses spark and set off a bunch of firecrackers duct-taped together. Five used to build stuff like this all the time when he was a kid. He and Luther would make bottle rockets and set them off on the roof gardens.

“It’s a lot easier with the explosives ready-made,” Five says, as she unspools wire between the trees.

“You used to do this?” she says. “In the apocalypse?”

“Yeah,” Five says. “Good for setting a perimeter around camp.”

Vanya considers for a moment. “What for?” she says. “Were there people?”

Five looks up from duct-taping firecrackers to a tree. He seems thrown by the question.

“It’s okay,” Vanya says. “If you don’t want to talk—”

“There were a few people,” Five says. “But only in the first couple of years. After that, it was just me.” His voice has gone slower and quieter. It’s obviously a bad memory; Vanya can only imagine why. She shouldn’t have asked. “There were plenty of animals, though. Generally extremely hungry. Packs of wild dogs, coyotes. Plus—well, all kinds of things. A few zoo animals made it. Interbred. Funny story about a tiger I should tell you sometime.”

“Doesn’t sound that funny,” Vanya says. She did that, she thinks. She did that to Five, to the whole world. Billions of lives; she can’t even fathom it enough for guilt. She got a do-over. But Five didn’t: he still spent a lifetime in that lost desolate future. His life’s on her. She wonders if he thinks about that ever.

She carries on unspooling the wire, brings it to Five. He pulls it taut, measures and snips and ties the plastic tag loosely, snips again and pops it into place. “One down,” he says. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.” Her stomach is twisting with dread.

“What happened when Ben died?”

Vanya tilts her head, a little ashamed to be relieved. “I thought you knew? It was on a mission. Something went wrong, with his creature. It was an accident.”

“I know,” Five says. “I mean, what happened after. I noticed you didn’t put any of it in the book. You just skip to three months later, when Diego moves out.”

Vanya shrugs. “Even I had limits, you know?”

“I’d like to know,” Five says. “If you can.”

Vanya leans against the tree trunk. “So,” she says. “I was on my own in the house when it happened, of course, because everyone else was on the mission. I was doing math homework in the kitchen, and it was boring, so I put the TV on in the background. It was Oprah, then the local news came on, and they mentioned the Academy but at first I figured it was just yay, another successful mission, bullshit, so I ignored it. Then there’s Dad on his own doing a press conference about Ben.” She sucks in a breath that hitches. “Apparently he wanted everyone with him, but they were all too much of a mess for him to put them on TV. He was kind of mad about it.”

“Bastard,” Five says quietly.

“Well,” Vanya says, with a little one-sided smile. “His brand.”

Five puts a hand on her arm.

She says, “So the others get home. Everyone’s a wreck. Klaus can’t even stand up straight. He was the one—y’know, in the room when it happened. Dad sits us all down in his study, right in the inner sanctum, first and last time. He gives us all a stupid speech about fortitude and a shot of Scotch. Me too. Never felt so included. In retrospect I guess he was worried I’d blast straight through my meds and throw him out a window.”

“Honestly,” Five says, “that sounds like a reasonable response.”

“Then they just left us all on our own down in the kitchen,” Vanya says. “And it was just, just horrible. Then at midnight Mom came in and sort of scooped us up one by one, handed out sleeping pills and put us to bed.”

“I should’ve,” Five says. He stops there.

“Don’t,” Vanya says. “You couldn’t have done anything.” She doesn’t know exactly what Five’s regretting: running away, or not being able to save Ben when they time travelled. Either way, it’s not his fault.

“Hm,” Five says. “We can always stick to being mad with the old man.” His hands are in his pockets, and he’s looking into the middle distance, wearing that sad, wry little smile that makes his face look so much older than thirteen.

“Group project,” Vanya says. She tries to make eye contact, to get him back from wherever he’s gone. “Is there a reason you’re asking now?”

“Vanya,” Five says. “I should’ve.” He sighs. “You’re right. Time for regrets later. I've got a whole lifetime of them to cover, so.” He drops a hand into his pocket, shakes his head. “They’ll wait. I just need to … to try not add any more to the list.”

Vanya puts a hand on his arm. “Five,” she says, as gently as she can.

He twitches a smile. She can see he’s not going to talk about it. But the look in his eyes is plain: he’s afraid.

 

***

_Dear Dolores,_

_How are you? Good, I hope: now you’re back home, with your friends, doing what you were always supposed to be doing. Got to beat hanging out in the apocalypse, anyway. I’m sure you think of me from time to time. I think of you often. Always._

_Yes, I know I have no way to send this letter. I’m dumb but I’m not that dumb. I guess I felt like writing to you despite that. Is it fanciful of me to think you might hear this anyway? You were always good at knowing what I’m thinking._

_I hope you’re adjusting. It’s not easy, is it? Neither of us are exactly who we were forty-five years ago. Lucky at least we don’t show our age, haha._

_I think it’s fair to admit I’m a little lost without you._

_It’s funny. Sometimes I can still hear your voice in my head, and I can imagine just what you’d say. But you’re not here. That’s not an easy thing. Being alone isn't an easy thing, after a lifetime with you. Yeah, I know, I have my family back. I got home. We stopped the end of the world. Everything I ever wanted, really._

_The bad news is that the Commission aren't letting it fly. So I don't know how long all this is all going to last. After I finally saved my family, stopped that shit, I'd hoped—I don't know what I was hoping for, exactly. A second chance, or if that's too ambitious, at least some peace at the end of it all. Turns out nothing’s simple: who’d have thought, eh?_

_I try not to ruminate on it too much, but there's a worst case scenario here. We’re not there yet. Worrying won't help. But the Temps Commission have stepped things up a few dozen notches. First bespoke weapons, now what's looking very much like a bespoke assassin. Metaphysics department must have a whole R and D team getting excitable on this one. I've heard of cases where they went this big, but I never saw one. Of course, the thing of it is, even I don’t know how big the Temps Commission go. I know the home office is just a little cog in a big machine. I know no one there seems to know how big the organisation really is, or who, or what, is at the top._

_Being home isn’t always how I thought it would be. Remember how I thought when I saw my brothers and sisters again, they were just how I'd expected from Vanya’s book? A bunch of emotionally stunted adult kids who'd never managed to grow up. Seems I underestimated them, all of them. All six of them have surprised me, done things I never knew they could. Yeah, that's right, six, not four. Ben and Vanya too. Guess when the old man used to rant about all our potential, he wasn't talking out of his ass after all. He never said that to Vanya, of course, but that's a whole other problem._

_Funny thing is, I'm finding myself envious, of that capacity for transformation. Turns out I'm not much good at some stuff any more. People stuff, really: you knew I was going to say that, ,right? Of course I used to be good at changing. I adapted. I adapted so much back in the good old apocalypse. You know all about that; I wouldn't have made it without you. But now I guess I'm starting to feel my age, maybe. Starting to wonder how much more change I've got left in me. Even I've got limits, or so I hear._

_Don't worry; I'm not about to quit. That's another thing I never learned how to do. Now I think to it, I guess I've never stopped, not since I was thirteen years old. I do wonder what it'd be like, though, sometimes: stopping. Sometimes I just feel a little tired._

_No, scratch that: I’m very tired. And I'm afraid. I can admit that to you at least. I’m afraid of what they’ll do to my family—and maybe most of all, what they’ll do to Vanya. I never found her body, remember? At first I hoped she'd survived, that I’d find her alive in the ruins. We both know that never happened. But now I think I know why she wasn't there, what happened to her—and what could happen again, in this shiny new timeline we’ve all sweated to create._

_What if I can't stop it?_

_I know I'm off my game right now. I can push through it, I can just push through. But even if I weren't—the truth is, I don't see how we can win this._

_I know. Stop whining. Keep moving. Miles to go before we sleep._

_Anyway, thanks for listening to me. You were always a wonderful listener, if a little too blunt in your replies. I’m joking, of course. Your insights have saved me as often as they’ve dented my ego. I miss your sharp mind. I hope you’re having an easier time of it than this, anyway. You deserve it. This was never your fight, but you had my back for so long. I’ll be grateful for all you gave me, as long as I live._

_Please take care of yourself. I hope you’ve found some peace of mind._

_Always,_   
_Five._

 

***

Allison rolls her neck around, trying to work out a little of the tension, then resettles herself at the end of the couch. She’s really not getting much reading done. Granted, her headache is still bugging her. Besides, the best on offer out of that box of books, after Klaus called dibs on the bad cowboy novel, was a spiral-bound local Junior League cookbook from the sixties titled Spruce Wood Delicacies. It’s not exactly a page-turner, though it turns out people used to make salad out of hot dogs and banana in jello, which she supposes definitely counts as a plot twist.

The back of her neck prickles. She rubs it, and looks up, irritated with her own tension. She glances over at the empty chair in the corner. The living room’s quiet: Klaus took himself to bed next door, Vanya’s upstairs practicing that same baroque violin piece again. Five’s on watch. Goodness knows what Diego and Luther are doing, but both of them looked wrung out earlier. Luther muttered that he needed to be alone, then went off to do that, so she gave him his space. He’s taking Pogo’s death very hard: of course he is. As for Allison, every time she looks down, the shadows and her own mind trick her and she has to look up and check, check the room’s empty.

They need to plan, she knows they do. Nobody’s in the mood for it tonight, least of all her.

God, she’s realised what this spooked feeling reminds her of: that terrible wendigo horror movie she did in 2011, The Pines, that was it, because her agent told her they’d booked Donald Sutherland for the reclusive trapper who mentors the stupid kids but then once she’d signed on it turns out he’d pulled out and now it was Eric Roberts. She wasn’t sure what it was, but that location, up north of here in the Canadian woods, had had an atmosphere to it. It had creeped her out despite the stupidity of the whole thing. Probably, her own mind was doing it to her. But when she napped in her trailer she started dreaming about Ben; maybe not so much dreams as flashbacks. Like when she first realised on the mission something was wrong: she heard Klaus from the other room, making that terrible long sound halfway between a howl and a sob, and she knew something had gone so bad. Sitting together in the back of the car with the smell of blood. Dad handing them each a single, carefully measured shot of Scotch, with that mechanical pat on the shoulder. Ben’s face as he lay on the floor. He was gone before Allison got there. Ben’s face, his mouth gaping open, and that fly landed on his forehead and his eyes just carried on staring at nothing, not even a blink (of course not) and suddenly all of them broke at once, and she vomited into her clasped hands without even realising it was going to happen.

This is so stupid, she thought on that set. So stupid that this place is freaking me out when there’s no real horror in this stupid movie, when someone should make a movie about what it feels like when a fly lands on your brother’s eyebrow and then your dad tries to make you all do a press conference after with your hands smelling of puke and your brother crying so much he can't stand up straight, and then in the long weeks after, nobody’s talking and your whole world is cracking open, like a melting iceberg, drifting into pieces.

She wishes she could see Ben right now. She’s not going to wake up Klaus. So she just imagines Ben where he probably actually is (and that’s such a good comforting thought: that he’s there with them, right now, despite it all), perched on the arm of a chair with his nose in a book.

She looks around for him anyway, smiles at the air. Maybe that’s what this is, that prickling feeling, that looking around for someone: maybe it’s just Ben.

She’s not enjoying this room, though. She goes out to the porch and smokes a quiet cigarette, looking out into the darkening woods. She remembers that shape, that person she glimpsed out there. A hiker. There are no shapes out in the trees, nothing to see. They’ve got enough worries without making their own urban legends.

People in the sixties also used to make salad out of tuna, cottage cheese and Miracle Whip. You could, apparently, shape it into a ring and decorate it with tinned pineapple rings and glacé cherries, to serve at a special dinner.

When Vanya’s violin dies down, Allison heads up to bed. She tells Vanya about the jello salads and the Miracle Whip and the pasta casseroles with condensed mushroom soup. She doesn’t tell Vanya about the ice-cream headache, or the empty chair, or the reflection she saw in the window on watch, or the prickling feeling she gets looking out at the silent patch of forest.

She can’t sleep for a while. She hears Luther’s heavy tread coming up the stairs, into the room next door. She thinks about going to him, asking him how he’s doing. He doesn’t want to talk about it. He needs to sleep; so does she. They all do.

She doesn’t know when she finally falls asleep. But she dreams a rasping mechanical voice, something horribly organic but filtered through a machine: it’s throaty, catching with phlegm, almost gurgling. It's calling her name, and at the end of _Allison_ it clicks horribly, like a little choke.

_Allison. Allison._

It says _when did you last see your daughter, Allison, when did you see her?_

She’s so angry. _How dare you?_ , she dreams, _get the hell away from me_.

_Oh. Oh, should I go see her first? Or you? Yeah, that's what I thought. I’ll let myself in, then._

She’s rigid and nauseous with alarm. She cannot move, the way you absolutely cannot move in a dream. _I heard a rumour you can’t move a muscle._ She hears the window catch open. Someone pushes the sash up. She knows she should open her eyes, but she feels frozen.

Her own breaths are loud in her ears. Hers, and Vanya’s quiet breathing from the other bed. And … a third. Heavy panting, thick, like a dog, a big dog that's been running hard.

She opens her eyes.

The wolf’s head and shoulders are already through the open window. Its human hands grasp at the sill. It stares at her, with blank yellow pitiless eyes, and it _keeps moving_.

She’s paralysed, staring, her insides liquid terror, and then suddenly it all spills out into fearful rage and she yells out all the air from her lungs, has thrown a boot from her bedside to the window, full force—

Glass shatters. Alison jerks awake, stares at the empty broken window. She hears a high panicked half-awake mutter, the bed shifts next to her, and then a fast whoosh of wind comes up from nowhere, swinging the light fittings and rattling branches outside. She gasps.

“Allison?” Vanya mumbles. “Wha’?” The wind picks up more , and then, as Vanya sits up in the dim moonlight and looks around her, it dies down. “What—what?”

“It’s okay,” Allison says. “I was having a nightmare. It was just—”

Her head aches. She remembers the tall hunched figure in the woods, the chill in her brain, the glimpse of something standing behind her reflection, the hot breath on her neck. It wasn’t _just_ anything, was it—

The door bursts open, and Luther and Diego are nearly fighting each other to get through it first.

“Allison!” Luther yells.

“Do we have company?” Diego cuts in, gesturing at the broken window with a knife.

Ben whooshes through both of them, and they blink at him and it’s almost funny. “Guys?” he says.

“Um,” Vanya says. “Allison had a nightmare—”

And then Five, of course, is here, avoiding the log jam at the door by blinking right in at the foot of the bed. He levels a pistol at the broken window.

“De-escalate!” Allison says, raising a finger. Her tone’s automatically lowered into Mom-Serious. “Everyone calm the hell down, right _now_.”

Everyone stops, just for a moment. She’s a little impressed at herself. Diego steps further into the room, enough for Luther to duck and negotiate the door frame.

Behind him, Klaus slides in. He’s out of breath, face drawn, holding his side, propping himself against the wall as he hauls himself into the room. Diego swoops in and puts Klaus’ arm over one shoulder, takes his weight.

Klaus looks Allison right in the eye. He says, “You saw it, didn’t you?”

“Shit,” Ben says. “Quantum Freddy.”

Allison nods silently.

Five mutters, “Oh, shit.” He shakes his head.

“What?” Allison says.

“He’s tracking us. And it’s working.”

“The wolf man?” Klaus says.

“Wait, who?” Diego says.

“Yeah,” Five says. “He’s hunting us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extra thanks to Rad-hoodd/wearealltalesintheend for the possum inspiration. Jeff lives!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extra content note/heads up this chapter (mild spoilers): there’s a brief but heavy discussion taking in suicide and dysphoria. It’s towards the end of the fifth section.
> 
> Customary thanks to [fanthings/majure](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Majure/pseuds/Majure) for light-speed betaing and moral support and letting me witter on at them about this fic. Go read their epic [Ten Months](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18214736/chapters/43091279) if you like Klave, it slaps.

Allison feels like she can hardly string a thought together. Maybe it’s the shock; maybe it’s the fact that all six of her siblings are in her bedroom, all talking over each other at once. Maybe it doesn’t help that it’s 2am and she just woke up from a nightmare that was very probably something much worse than a nightmare. 

Vanya sits next to her on the bed, one hand grounding and warm on her back. She holds out a water bottle; Allison takes a grateful sip and tries to follow the chaos.

“I can tell you this much,” Five says, “we’ve got a lot less than six days until they find us. The wolf man has to be a Commission agent. And he’s tracking us, and he’s escalating. Fast.” 

“So we’re getting out of here right now,” Diego says. “Let’s go.”

“No,” Five says. He sits heavily on the end of Vanya’s bed. “Moving isn’t going to make a difference now. Astral projection: he locks onto consciousness, not location.” He tuts at the blank looks he gets. “If he can track us here, he can track us anywhere. Moving won’t even slow him down.”

“I can fight him,” Vanya says. Her voice is low and quavering, but there’s fire in it, and Allison can see her spine straighten. “I can fight all of them. It’s okay.”

“No!” Five says quickly. “It’s not that simple. The gun, the boom box, remember?”

“So?” Vanya says, chin up. “It knocked you on your ass too. I get that I can’t sprint round the block and I don’t know what a perimeter is, but I can still smash this bastard into the ground.”

“But you’re the one they want,” Luther says. “You caused the apocalypse, and they want to make sure it happens, right?”

“But I _won’t_ ,” Vanya says. “I won’t do that again.”

“I know,” Luther says, extending a conciliating hand. “I know you’ve learnt how to control your powers, you’ve come so far, I appreciate it, we all do. But, you just smashed a window because you got caught off guard. The Commission are going to try to provoke you, make you lose control—”

“So what?” Vanya says. “You gonna choke me out and lock me in the basement?”

 _Damn_ , Allison thinks. Luther freezes. Then he looks down, exhales. “Okay,” he says. “I deserved that.”

Allison says, deliberately calm, “ _I_ smashed the window. I threw a boot at the wolf.”

“Oh,” Luther says. Allison opens her mouth to say _apologise to Vanya_ , Diego gets in first with a _hey, hey_ , but then Luther beats them both to it. “I'm sorry,” he says, only a little mumbling. “I made a mistake. I shouldn't have assumed.”

“Sure,” Vanya says, her voice light. It doesn’t sound entirely forgiving. 

“If he’s like a ghost,” Diego says, “can’t Ben just fuck him up?”

Klaus turns to Ben and shakes his head frantically. 

“Why not?” Ben says. “Why can’t I?”

Klaus says, “I think Mikey’s gone. I can’t find him. I think maybe when the wolf man ripped out his throat it did something permanent to him, and—”

Luther says, “I agree with Klaus. It’s too risky to have Ben—”

“It’s _my_ risk,” Ben says. “I’m not a freaking pet.”

“I’ll find this asshole,” Klaus says. His shoulders twitch a shrug. “I can go find him. In the dream place.”

“Does that come with a plan?” Five says. He’s uncharacteristically quiet, slumped at the end of the bed with his arms resting on his knees. 

Klaus shrugs. “Find the bastard and pile on. There.”

“How did that work out for you last time?” Five says. He raises his left arm and waves it. 

“Wait,” Allison says, “is that how you hurt your arm?”

Klaus holds up his left arm and peels back the dressing to show the bite punctures spanning his whole forearm. 

Diego whistles; Vanya sucks in a breath. 

“Why didn't you say something?” Diego says. 

Klaus shrugs. “Why is it up to me? Can’t it be Five’s turn today to tell a crazy story and get a bunch of eyerolls?”

“Five?” Allison says. “You knew about this too?”

“And Luther,” Ben says. 

Luther narrows his eyes at Ben. “And you.”

Allison shakes her head. “Fantastic. Just …” 

Diego folds his arms. “And none of you thought to share?”

“I was working on the plumbing …” Luther mumbles.

Wow. Allison exhales propulsively. “Why can't anyone in this family _talk to each other_?” She eyeballs all of them in turn and gets some satisfying winces. “We’re all stuck in this tiny cabin together, you'd think when we’re right on top of each other, we could somehow manage not to constantly keep important information to ourselves.”

“Would it have made a difference?” Five says. His voice is low; he’s still sitting slumped, looking at his clasped hands. 

“ _Yes_ ,” Allison says. Klaus shuts his eyes and rubs a hand over his face; Diego rolls his eyes and snorts.

“Well, what about you?” Five says. “You had a previous sighting of the individual concerned, surely given your psychic abilities you’d want to report what you saw on watch?”

“Psychic what?” Diego says. 

Allison says, at the same time, “Wait, you’re saying I was more likely to see Klaus’s wolf man than the others?”

“He's not _my_ wolf man,” Klaus says. “Come to think of it, Five did say something about you and me having similar powers,” he pulls a face, “which, news to me, and—”

“Oh, he did?” Allison says, aiming consciously for a dangerous tone. 

“It was Five's theory,” Klaus says, waving a hand, “and y’know, it was pretty ridiculous, so—”

“I should've said something,” Luther blurts. “I don't know why I didn't, it was just, we were talking about the possum, and then I was on watch, and—”

“Yeah,” Allison says. “You should've said.” She turns to Ben. “What about you, Ben? Why didn’t you mention it, you had too much going on?”

“Me?” Ben looks completely thrown by the idea. “I'm—it's not my—” He seems to run out of words. He shakes his head, looking very uncomfortable, and lifts his hands in defeat. 

Allison carries on staring him out. Without breaking eye contact, she says evenly, “Klaus? Do not bail him out of this.”

From the periphery of her vision, Allison sees Klaus shrug theatrically and mouth “sorry!”

“Maybe,” Luther says, “we need to nominate one person to be I dunno, secretary, and everyone reports info to them and and they could, y’know, disseminate…”

“Jesus, Luther,” Five mutters. “This isn't the Hardy Boys.”

“Thought we reported to you, Number One,” Diego says. 

Without another word, Five blinks out.

“There he goes,” Diego says. “The moment it gets awkward.”

“He’s got to go _think_ ,” Klaus says, making a mock-serious pout and putting his hand to his chest. Diego snorts. 

Attention off him, Ben takes the opportunity to sidle out. It would probably be less conspicuous if he didn't have to walk straight through Diego to do it. And if Diego didn't then jump, throw his arms up in a useless defence pose, and yell, “Shit! Ben! What the shit!” And then Klaus cackles, and Luther stares with open curiosity followed moments later by a guilty duck of his head. Vanya winces. 

And Allison can't hear herself think.

“Okay!” Allison says, “Everybody out of our room. Please.”

“We’re just ignoring this?” Diego says. 

Klaus sighs, unlatches himself from Diego’s supporting grip, and leans on the wall, wincing, as he starts hobbling out. 

Diego rolls his eyes at Klaus and slings an arm round his back again, holding him up. He grabs the hand Klaus was waving goodbye with and slings it over his own shoulder. That’s Diego persuaded out too, then. Klaus turns and flashes Allison and Vanya a wink: so, either it was a deliberate ploy, or it wasn't but he's happy to take credit for how it worked out. 

That leaves Luther. He hesitates at the door. “Shouldn't someone be here in case—” 

Allison points to Vanya.

“Oh,” Luther says. “Good point.” He shuffles. “Well, goodnight. Stay safe. If anything happens, we’re, y’know, right across the hall.”

“I know,” Allison says. He turns, still anxious and puppyish. She crosses the room, touches his arm and lets him hug her. The tension seeps out of her and she sighs. “Hey,” she says, in the absence of anything more reassuring. 

“Hey,” he rumbles back. Then he breaks the hug, raises a hand in farewell and ducks his head under the doorframe to leave, shutting the door behind him.

Allison exhales and turns. Vanya is sitting cross-legged on her own bed now. She says, “So. Should we take it in turns to sleep?”

Allison flops onto her bed face down. “Ugh, no,” she says. “Fuck it. If this creep shows up again, let's just beat him to paste.”

Vanya chuckles. Allison knows it's all bravado from both of them: the wolf man is hunting them down, that's the real problem. Once he's worked out where they are in the real world, they get a whole army raining bullets on them; an army who've come fully prepared even for Vanya. 

They hit the lights and settle down, still pretending gamely to be on top of the situation. Allison doesn't get much sleep for the rest of the night. Frankly, she doubts anyone does.

***

“How ‘bout now?” Ben calls.

“Yup,” says Diego, with a finger point. “Right there.”

Klaus tilts his hands and smiles twitchily. To be honest, Ben thinks, watching Klaus looking steadily more wigged as he’s confronted with how much stronger his powers have gotten is half the fun of this. 

Klaus and Diego were up early; like everyone else, they didn’t sleep great after Allison’s dream encounter with their latest Commission stalker. Not that Ben exactly sleeps now. He’d say it’s more like he chills intensely; he just zones out until the world is a hazy background hum, and his thoughts turn so slow they feel almost still. It’s nice. But after what happened at 2am, he didn’t feel exactly comfy doing that. 

Instead, while Klaus tossed and turned in the bedroom next door, Ben spent some fun time sitting in the dark, silent living room, speculating on whether this wolf man dude expelled Mikey the gangster from this plane of existence, or just straight up ate his soul. 

For once, Ben gets to be as rattled as the rest of them. 

And that, in short, is how Diego’s 6am mid-coffee question about how far Ben could go from Klaus before he “stops manifesting or turns invisible or whatever” became an opportunity to get out of the house, head out front and distract themselves while the sun comes up over the mountains. 

“I think I’m twenty feet away now,” Ben says. “Does it look like twenty to you guys?”

Klaus shrugs. 

“Yup,” Diego says. “Now let’s see how solid you are.” He pulls a knife, spins it, aims. 

“What the hell?” Ben yells. 

“What?” Diego calls. “How can it even hurt you? I mean, what happens if it hits? Does it like, bounce off?”

“Peanuts bounce off,” Klaus offers helpfully. 

“Peanuts bounce off of everything,” Diego says. “That’s like, regular physics, not ghost physics.”

“ _Ghost physics?_ ” Klaus wrinkles his nose. 

Ben saves himself from the experiment by swooping a hand through a tree trunk. “Twenty feet,” he says. “No more physical manifestation.”

“Wait up,” Klaus calls. “Lemme just try from here, I wanna see if Diego can shank you.” He balls his fists, and blue light flares within them with alarming ease. Six months ago, (relatively speaking—time travel is so weird) physical manifestation of the dead was a terrifying new power. Four days ago it was a significant call upon Klaus’ concentration and focus. Now it’s something he does without mentioning so he can flick Ben on the ear. 

“Do the tree trunk thing again,” Diego says. Ben rolls his eyes, and gingerly waves his hand at the tree, just in case. It goes straight through. 

“Out of range,” Ben says. “Now I know how far I have to run when I don't want peanuts thrown at my head.”

“C’mon, Ben!” Diego calls. “You can take him down, easy. Okay, now see how far you can go before you go poof.”

Next to Diego, Klaus raises his hands in a theatrical shrug. 

Ben’s just started walking backwards when he sees Luther striding up from the house, looking grim and stressed. 

“Where’s Five?” Luther says. 

“Thinking?” Ben says. He gets a nervous half-smile out of Klaus, but otherwise it doesn’t land. 

“He was supposed to wake me up and hand over night watch to me two and a half hours ago,” Luther says. “I woke up after six, and I can’t find him anywhere in the house.”

“Think he took the van for a ride some time in the night,” Ben says. “I heard the engine.” 

“What?” Luther says. “And you didn’t stop him?”

“What was I supposed to do?” Ben says. “He couldn’t even see me.” 

“You could’ve woken Klaus up,” Diego says. 

“I dunno,” Ben says, “I figured Five was blowing off some steam.”

“Well, the van’s back now,” Klaus says. He points a finger at it. “Did you hear it come back?” 

Ben shakes his head. “I think I finally managed to zone out. I must have missed it.” Klaus’s lips twitch and he catches Ben’s eye, gives him the empathy look. So he’s noticed how restless Ben is. Ben finds himself torn between relief at being seen, and missing the days when Klaus noticed zip and Ben had some emotional privacy. The best and worst thing about being seen is _being seen_ , Ben thinks. Not exactly Oscar Wilde, but it’s the story of his, well, existence right now. 

“He was supposed to be on watch!” Luther says. He puts a hand to his forehead and exhales forcefully. “Allison was right, nobody here mentions to anyone else even when it’s so obviously important—”

“Hey, hey, hey,” Diego says. “Ben’s not the one who skipped watch and went off in the middle of the night without saying anything. Besides, he brought the van back. We all know what’s going on, you’re gonna find Five drunk off his ass on the porch or something.” 

Luther shakes his head. “Hate to say it, but—I hope it’s just that.”

Ben and Klaus exchange looks again. Ben feels his notional stomach drop. _He’s hunting us_ , Five had said last night. _He’s escalating._ And then … Five gritted his teeth through forty-five years of apocalyptic survival and murder for hire, just to get back to them. He’s the most insanely determined person Ben has ever met. Whoever or whatever it is that could make Five give up, Ben is disinclined to meet them. 

But it’s coming, whether they want it to or not. And Ben knows that feeling just a little too well.

***

It takes Luther less than thirty seconds to find Five. Diego was absolutely right. That’s a little grating, but it beats the hell out of the alternatives.

Five is, in fact, technically still on his watch, though it’s a pretty loose interpretation of the concept. He’s sitting against a tree trunk, bangs flopping in his eyes, a mostly empty vodka bottle cradled tenderly in the crook of his arm. Over by the garbage can, the resident possum is happily munching away at what looks to be an entire party size bag of Tostitos. 

“Jeff,” Five is saying. “That’s … that’s just it, Jeff. You're right. In the end, I’m just one man.” His voice lowers to a quiet, wrecked undertone. “Dolores always used to say I was a chronic overreacher.” He sighs, looks sadly over to the possum, who has now stuck his entire face in the chip bag. “Yeah, you’ve got a point. She probably was right.” He shakes his head slowly and snorts. “You two would have gotten along.” 

Luther takes a moment. Yes, of course this is what happened. Sometime after Allison’s—nightmare? vision? haunting?— Five went out in the dead of night, when he was supposed to be on watch. Somehow—he almost doesn’t want to know how—he obtained a bottle of vodka, and he has apparently spent the early hours getting shitfaced while talking it out with their resident garbage possum. Of course. 

“Five?” Luther tries.

Five looks up, bleary and red-eyed. “I already knew you were there,” he says. “You loom. You were looming.”

Luther bites back his first response, which is something like _what the hell do you think you're doing?_ Instead he says, “What's going on?”

“What it looks like,” Five says. He spreads his hands, keeping a tenuous hold on the vodka bottle. “Voilà.” 

“You were supposed to be on watch,” Luther says, frowning. Five can be erratic, but he's fixated on survival, especially right now. Two days ago he was telling them all to skin rabbits rather than take the risk of grabbing supplies at a big box store (in retrospect, he had a point); yesterday he was bugging everyone to help set up his homemade tripwire perimeter. Kind of an ominous shift to go from all that to skipping out on night watch to grab liquor by any means necessary. 

“Luther, Luther,” Five says, shaking his head. “Still the complete Boy Scout. None of it really matters. Not the watch schedule or the equations or the defence plan or the fricking tripwires. They're coming for us.” He blinks at the bottle in his hand, holds it up. “You want some of this?”

“No.” Luther lowers himself to the ground next to Five, feeling the usual half-disgusted irritation that his body’s so _unwieldy_ now. “So, you’re just giving up?” Not like Five at all.

“No.” Five rubs his face. “I'm getting ready to fight to the death. And lose.” He looks into the distance again. “I'm gonna die on my feet.” He laughs shortly. “Aren't you glad I brought those grenades?”

“So … why is it all suddenly so hopeless?” Luther says.

“Maybe we were always screwed,” Five says. “Maybe I've just been kidding myself all this time …” He hugs his knees. He's doing that thing, where he manages to look simultaneously very young and very old—and tired, and sad. Luther wants very much to put a hand on his shoulder. But he’s seen Five’s shoulders tense at casual touches, seen him masking how much it seems to throw him. Luther can empathise. 

“I’m here,” Luther says. “So tell me. Why?”

“I'm out of ideas,” Five says. He’s looking into the middle distance. His fingers curl around the vodka bottle. “Out of options. Checkmate.”

“Well, there are six other people here. Maybe one of us can come up with something.” 

Five snorts and shakes his head. It’s aggravating. 

“Well, how do you know we can’t?” Luther says. “Vanya saved your life the day before yesterday. Klaus is getting a new power every other day, I can’t even keep up. I don't think any of us are who we were when you showed up before Dad’s funeral.” He takes a breath. “Including you.”

“Aren’t you listening?” Five snaps. “Is this going over your head? It doesn’t matter who’s changing and growing and blossoming like a freaking tulip. The Commission are going to find us and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.”

“Nothing?” Luther says. “What about Klaus’s new thing, the lucid dream stuff? Maybe he can find this wolf guy, this agent, and—”

“Get ripped to shreds?” Five says. 

“Klaus can handle himself better than you think,” Luther says, wondering at the words even as they come out of his mouth. “Besides, Ben—”

“Can get ripped to shreds too?” Five says. “Again?”

Luther’s stomach turns, because he’s right. And because of the callousness of it, scoring points with what happened to Ben. Five’s a dick when he’s drunk. More of a dick. 

“You weren’t there,” Luther says, emphatic and warning. 

Five raises an eyebrow. “ _You_ weren’t there when Ben died either,” he says. “You were off in the next room playing hero, instead of taking care of your team—”

“Stop,” Luther says, through gritted teeth. He might as well be telling himself. There’s pressure behind his eyeballs. This is mean even for drunk Five: he knows Five is deliberately lashing out. “You're better than this, Five. You don't have to be alone, you don't have to push us away.”

“Yeah,” Five says. “You know the exact weight of it when you just … let someone die, Number One.” He wags a finger at Luther, the motion of his whole arm loose and sloppy. “Imagine that times seven … seven billion. And maybe step off a little.” 

“Screw it,” Luther says, trying and failing to let the words slide off him. “I'm done. Diego can come tuck you up in bed.”

“Fine,” Five slurs as Luther walks away. “Fine, fine. You’re a shitty listener anyway. Jeff knows the score. Don’t you, Jeff?”

There’s a long moment of silence, followed by a sound very readily identifiable as someone throwing up, hard.

***

So. Looks like Quantum Freddy is now the thing that’s going to get them killed fastest. There’s the priority. And it looks like Klaus is the only one of them who’s in a position to go find him and then, he guesses, pile on to this enormous literal werewolf. How fun.

The other thing they could do, of course, is wait for the wolf man to find them first. Klaus doesn’t even need Five to lay out that scenario: he finds them, he brings along a death squad. They put up a fight, they’re wildly outnumbered and in Vanya’s case literally outgunned, they all get ground to hamburger in short order. Then the world gets ended, again. Why the hell are these Commission pricks so hyped about the Apocalypse anyway?

Fuck. 

When you’ve got to go do something fucked up, better go do it before you think about it too much. That’s Klaus’ standard strategy. Distracting yourself until the last minute is good. Klaus had this great distraction going for a decade and a half. Now he does not. Good company works too. He had the best company, for just a little while. Not any more. 

Ben’s a bit of a wild card this way. Sometimes he’s up for comforting shit talk, sometimes he’ll be in a mood to be Asshole Jiminy Cricket and talk about the exact thing Klaus wants to ignore. Right now it’s even worse: he wants to argue. 

“What are you even gonna do if you find him?” Ben says. He’s pacing the deck.

Klaus looks up at him from his seat cross-legged on a couch cushion he’s dragged out to the deck. He spreads his hands. “Guess I’ll find out.”

Ben shakes his head and huffs in aggravation. “So he’ll chew you to shreds.”

“Yes, noted, thank you.” Klaus picks at a stray thread on the couch cushion . “Can you shut up? Or go away? Haunt someone else.”

“Take me with you,” Ben says. 

Klaus thunks his head back against the porch upright he’s sitting against. He looks away, at the half-smudged equations on the far wall of the porch. Knew it. Of course Ben was going to ask. Sounds smart, right? Why take on this fucker alone when you could take him on with your brother who manifests fifty foot death tentacles?

“Why not?” Ben says. Ben knows why not. He’s got his miserable Russian novel shoved into his jacket pocket with the spine bent backwards. He always mistreats his books when he’s mad. Lack of other things he can take his mood out on, Klaus guesses. 

Ben could take his mood out on the wolf man. Win-win. 

The wolf man ripped out Mikey the gangster’s throat, and now Mikey isn’t there. 

Klaus can’t. He can’t. He thinks about focussing in, letting Ben rest a hand on his shoulder while he lets himself freefall into the dream place or however it works, he doesn’t even know. All he can see in his mind is Ben’s throat clamped in the wolf man’s jaws, that horrible, too-fast moment, Ben lying twitching in his own blood. He feels on the edge of panic at the idea of even trying. 

“I can’t,” he says quietly.

Ben narrows his eyes. “You mean you don’t want to. You know if you get your ass killed in there, it matters too?” 

“Yeah,” Klaus says, rubbing his face. “We’re all about to get our asses killed. And this isn’t helping. So maybe if you could go take a break, go read about gulags or the end of the world or rich straight people in shitty marriages or whatever you’re into right now.”

“I can do this,” Ben says. 

“I can’t,” Klaus says again. He looks up at Ben. “I swear. It’s not just I don’t want to. You know my subconscious runs the show with my stupid powers. I can’t.”

“It _matters_ ,” Ben says. He eyeballs Klaus. “It matters if you get yourself killed. You know how many times you’ve scared the crap out of us? How many times I thought I was watching _you_ dying?” Klaus opens his mouth, but Ben continues. “Four days ago, Klaus.”

Klaus pulls a face. “C’mon. I wasn’t exactly _trying_ to get shot.”

Ben folds his arms. “No, you were charging in trying to save someone without engaging your brain. Again.”

Oh god. Stop talking, Ben. “Hmm,” Klaus says, going for studied nonchalance. “Doesn’t sound like me at all. I think you might be thinking of Diego. Maybe Five at a push.”

“Nope,” Ben says. “This is you now.” Oh, you _asshole_. “You know what happens to _me_ if you die? I’m alone. I don’t have any way of connecting with the world, I can’t even talk to my family—”

“You could move on,” Klaus says, quietly. Ben’s getting close to the bone, and so can he. 

“I don’t _want_ to,” Ben says. “I didn’t want this in the first place.”

“Newsflash, Benjamin,” Klaus snaps, “nobody does. Death’s a rip off. We know. You’re not the only pebble on the fucking beach. And you know, it’s not.” His throat closes. He sucks in a breath through his nose. “It’s a lot to ask of someone, sticking around. It’s shitty. It’s too much to ask.”

Ben’s face shifts. Smart asshole that he is, he knows Klaus is no longer talking about Ben. His face softens. He reaches out to put a hand on Klaus’ shoulder. Klaus flexes his mind and lets him. “I do want to be here,” Ben says. “I just … 2003.”

“Yeah,” Klaus says softly. Their little time travel field trip to 2003: where Ben trained and ran and made himself bologna sandwiches and fell asleep on the rec room sofa four episodes into the Buffy marathon. 

“Kind of knew it wasn’t going to last,” Ben says, shaking his head. “I knew I shouldn’t get used to it.” 

Klaus is suddenly reminded so powerfully of Dave—the phrase, the tone, the measured self-protective pessimism—that he nearly smiles in recognition despite how sad it is that Ben and Dave have that in common. His chest pangs so bad and he can’t tell if it’s grief or his stupid lung. He puts a hand over his mouth to conceal it all and turns his head. 

He rubs his face. He comes back to where he is. God, why does Klaus have to make everything about his own shit? Ben got ripped off twice now. Of course he hates it. Klaus knows. “I got used to it too,” he says, truthfully. He breathes for a moment. “You know I can’t take you, Ben. Even if I try. I just.”

“I know.” Ben’s hands are shoved into his pockets and he’s toeing the floorboards. “Good luck,” he says. “You’re doing great, Klaus.” 

“Sure, I’m copacetic,” Klaus says lightly. “How are you over there?”

Ben raises an eyebrow. “Same. Freaking fantastic.” He makes an A-OK sign, and Klaus grins. They can read each other’s insincere deflections as easily as brutal honesty by now: that’s the magic of being constantly stuck with each other for a decade and a half. “Gonna go check out the gulag,” Ben says, getting out his book. He turns back as he’s walking off. “Don’t do anything dumb.”

Klaus presses a hand to his chest and gives Ben an open-mouthed never-would-I-ever face. Ben rolls his eyes, then as his foot crosses the threshold he winks out. 

Ben has left him the quiet. The birds chirp, the tree branches rustle. Klaus rolls his neck on his shoulders, scratches a couple of stray itches. Then he takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, hands loose on his knees. 

The quiet lasts a full thirty seconds before Klaus hears a door slam, and then Diego yelling _do not walk away from me!_ Then, _don’t fuckin’ poof away either_.

Ah, so Diego has decided to discuss things with Five, who right now should be on that delightful cusp between _raging hangover_ and _still kind of shitfaced_. 

“How ‘bout you do not big brother me, huh? I’m twice your age, an’, an’ I have seen things you can’t possibly imagine. So.” Yup. Five’s still drunk. 

“You know what I can’t possibly imagine?” The stressed pitch of Diego’s voice carries through the closed porch door. “Taking it on myself to step up and lead this family, because I was _smarter_ and _better_ than the rest of us, and then never telling us shit, and when I got called on it, driving off in the night to blow our cover by stealing vodka so I could get wasted and vent to a trash cat!”

That was a solid roast, Klaus has got to give Diego that. 

“Well,” Five says, acid and tense and a little slurred, “imagination was never your strong suit.”

There’s a short, un-Diego-like pause. Then, “You wanna consider the idea that you might have a drinking problem?”

Oh boy. Well, that’s torn it. Klaus is going somewhere else to do this. Maybe the lake? Looks quiet down there. 

“No,” Five says. “You wanna consider the idea that my _problem_ might be the end of the freaking world?”

Klaus unfolds his legs. He braces himself against the the porch upright, reaches for the rail, and starts levering himself up. He’s good, mostly, once he’s on his feet, but his chest likes to make getting up and down unfun. He breathes through it, right arm guarding his bad side; then he’s up. He takes a moment, then kicks up his purloined couch cushion, catches it in both hands, pulls his stitches and pulls a face. 

The stairs down from the porch are a process, but once he’s down on the soft ground of the dirt track, it’s better. As he walks, the noises from the house start to fade out pleasingly. The last words he can make out are Five yelling “Calm the hell down!” in a voice that isn’t calm in the slightest. 

It takes him maybe five minutes to get to the lake shore, at his current geriatric pace. Halfway down he realises it’s the longest walk he’s attempted since the injury, and that he’s probably slightly overreached. His wound and his ribs have started twingeing with every step. It’s cool, he says to himself. Had worse. Top tip, don’t ever get defibrillated while wearing a vintage polyester crop top.

As usual, it’s a lot harder to convince himself without an audience. He hasn’t had worse. He’s just seen worse. 

When he started down here, Klaus had a vague notion of sitting at the end of the jetty at the lake’s edge, trying to hypnotise himself with the glittering disco ball patterns of the sun glinting off the water. But the sun’s gone in now, and anyway, just watching pretty patterns to get his mind quiet only ever really worked when he was high. Besides, now he sees it up close, the jetty looks half-ruined and unreliable. He pictures putting a foot through rotten wood and pitching right into the water; or rolling over when he’s out and going over the jetty edge without even realising. The water looks freezing and murky and full of undertow. Klaus’ shoulders tense. Drowning is a shitty death, he knows because people who’ve drowned always seem to feel the need to overshare to him about it: how it’s a myth that it doesn’t hurt, how you panic first and that’s the worst part, how undertow feels like a cold hand round your ankle. Ugh. 

He drops the cushion onto the thready grass verge by the trail, a safe few feet back from the lake’s edge. He gets himself down, leaning on his knuckles as he crosses his legs, breathing hard through his nose. His side settles down. He’s quiet. And of course, right away, here it all comes: the itch at the roots of his hair, the endless streaming chatter of his stupid brain, a hundred distractions swarming and stinging and buzzing in his ears. 

_The panic is the worst part_ , his brain says unhelpfully. They say that and they’re right. He remembers back at the house after he got shot, that whoosh of dazed anxiety—he guesses now he was going into shock. Or that time in Santa Monica with the bad coke, just gasping _shit shit shit_ and scrabbling at his shirt while his heart tried to vault out his mouth. 

Ben had panicked. He’d been terrified the whole time he was dying: how could you not be, sixteen and you're on the floor with your throat torn out?

So fast. Klaus saw it happen from behind, and the image has stayed clear and sharp in his head all these years. He saw the tentacles go slap-slap-slap and knock Ben down, and Ben skidded back on his ass, and it looked like nothing, it looked _funny_ , just the creature giving Ben a little grief like it did sometimes. Klaus went to help him up and crack a joke ( _Hoist by your own petard, what the fuck’s a petard anyway? Bitch-slapped by your own bentacles?_ ) and he looked down and saw the red mess of Ben’s neck. He’d crashed to his knees and ripped off both their domino masks. Thank god he thought to do that, at least. Ben looked at Klaus the whole time, his mouth gaped open and he made this horrible noise trying to gasp in air, and the blood made bubbles in the wound. And a minute later Ben was gone, and Klaus couldn't even find him anywhere. 

He couldn’t find Dave either. He doesn’t even know how or why that works, except how do you call someone when you don’t know where the fuck you’re calling from? Both times, his brain had crashed out the same way, like a long animal scream, like where you are and what and when stop being real, or don’t make any sense, and certainly you can’t register anything as practical as _people are still shooting at you, dumbfuck_. For the longest time he’d said to himself _of course I broke, I was sixteen_ , but then he’d handled it no better at thirty. So there’s that. 

God, he should have stayed on the porch. Listening to Five and Diego’s stupid verbal slap fight would be fucking soothing comparing to the stuff his brain comes up with. Should’ve brought the stupid cowboy book. 

Klaus squeezes his eyes shut, takes a long slow deep breath in, a little deeper than he should because he knows his lung will yell at him and he might as well use it. Any distraction in a storm, or whatever. 

He’s always sucked at clearing his mind unaided. During compulsory meditation sessions as a kid, he’d get fidgety and bored and just fake it out by making up stories in his head. Klaus remembers when he was fifteen and going through that Buddhist phase: well, not so much Buddhism as jasmine tea and crap weed and stealing his dad’s copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and writing out the cool parts on his bedroom wall. He thought he’d try chanting, why not, when his brain was hammering him too hard during missions and he couldn’t focus, and that one time he was muttering _om mani padme hum_ to drown out that dead hijacker who was yelling at Klaus to glue his arm back on or some shit. And then the dead hijacker started yelling at him that he was a pretentious little teenage asshole, which had kind of stung due to being completely true, so Klaus switched to chanting the lyrics of Gangsta’s Paradise to try and piss him off. It had actually worked. The hijacker even told him what room the hostages were in to try and get him to stop, and then of course Klaus didn’t. 

Klaus is not getting anywhere. Screw Five for giving him that morphine. He didn’t need the extra reminder of how much shit—all of it, _all_ —a good opioid high can just wash away. He didn’t need his body remembering any more sharply that sweet warm loose floaty feeling, drifting like a helium balloon, that seeps in after that first rush of joy. He will always crave it, every single time shit goes down or his brain spirals. Every single time.

“Fuck!” he hisses. He punches his fist into the dirt beside him and it feels pretty good, so he does it again. “Fuck, fuck, fuck it!”

He can’t remember the lyrics to Gangsta’s Paradise past the first line. _As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, something something._ That’s going to bug him now. He used to count backwards in threes, at night sometimes when he was a kid, when he couldn’t sleep. Grace showed him how, after the first time in the mausoleum, and she sat with him and stroked his forehead with her cool smooth hand until he fell asleep again. He hasn’t tried it for decades. When he was thirteen and Dad took up the mausoleum lock-ins again as a regular bit of extracurricular enrichment, Klaus told Grace sniffily he was too old for that stuff. Actually he was just trying to get her out of the room so he could down some stolen Cointreau from Dad’s bar, that candied orange syrup taste lingering in his mouth after the burn of the liquor. 

Well, fuck it. Counting backwards in threes it is. 

_One hundred, ninety-seven, ninety-four_ , my shirt label itches, _ninety-one, eighty-eight_ , wish I had my walkman, _eighty-five_ , you can’t do this, can you, you asshole, you can’t hang onto anything, let it go, let it go, ha, _eighty-five, no eighty-two_ , I can’t concentrate any more, sixteen years of frying my synapses, what if my brain just doesn’t work any more? _seventy-nine, seventy-six_ , there’s a fly buzzing, _seventy-three, seventy_ , wow that’s loud, should open my eyes and check it’s not a wasp, _sixty-seven_ , you get those big-ass ones by the lakes, _sixty-four_ , remember those giant hornets in A Shau, oh my god, that time Cooper found one in the elephant grass eating a mantis, _hey Hargreeves, check this shit out, look at the size of that crazy fucker_ , then some fucking wit had said _looks like your mama on a dinner date_ , then Dave said, _yeah, we can always lower the tone more around here_. He always came off like the guy who reigned in everyone else’s bs but then he’d come out with these little zingers, no no no, I miss him so fucking much, it hurts, god, _sixty-four_ , shit, lost count, _sixty-one, fifty-eight, fifty-five—_

There’s a fractional moment where he knows what’s about to happen, the world gets loud and there’s a tight band of weight round his head, and something in him just gives, like a little sigh of resignation, no stopping it now— 

It’s no less overwhelming for that: the gunfire vibrates through his whole body, it’s a wall of sound, unrelenting, and his splayed left hand is slick with blood, he’s pressing down hard but it’s doing fuck all to stop the bleeding, and he can feel Dave’s curls against his cheek, can feel him shivering and breathing like he’s choking, and all Klaus can do is hold on to him, and his brain is crashing out but he’s trying to be there for Dave, no no no, and it’s a memory, it’s a memory but he cannot pull himself from it, it’s real, more real than the lake and the dirt, more real than Klaus is, and he's frozen in it like an insect in amber, and now he knows he will turn again to scream himself hoarse for a medic, the dread of it knifes through him, because then he will turn back and _god, god, no_ —

 _This isn’t working_ , he thinks, and he scrapes his hands hard into the dirt and then clenches them, his fingernails digging into the flesh of his palms along with tiny stones from the ground, and the lapping of the lake—time to stop—it's too much, too fucking much—

And then from nowhere, so fast, like undertow, the dark grabs hold of him. And it drags him down down down, and not even his panic can pull him back to the surface.

***

Vanya doesn’t remember getting to sleep, but she wakes—with a crick in her neck from the crappy pillow and a spring poking her in the butt from the crappy mattress—so clearly sleep came at some point. Allison stirs at the same time, but as usual, she’s already sprung out of bed while Vanya’s deep in the _five more minutes, Mom_ phase.

Vanya thumbs grit out of the corners of her eyes and groans. “Did you sleep much?” she says. 

“Ugh,” Allison says. “Hardly.” She rolls her head on her neck, then pulls off her silk sleep cap, fluffs and finger-combs her curls into shape. She sits on the edge of the bed in twelve dollar Walmart pyjamas which somehow look expensive on her, and starts her routine. 

It’s not entirely baffling to Vanya, given what Allison does for a living and how ridiculously well she does at it and how often she must get photographed coming out of the gym, that Allison carries the personal grooming equivalent of a bug-out bag in her regular handbag. And Vanya absolutely gets the confidence boost of primping up a little before you kick some ass. It’s the minutae that fox her. It’s a little like when she first saw her college girlfriend use those eyelash curlers that look like some torture implement. What is it? What does it do? Oh yeah, it does that. 

Allison’s grooming bug-out bag has a mirror, and eyelash curlers, and the sleep cap, and several kinds of stuff for her hair, and at least three little pots of moisturising goop aimed at different face and body parts, and multiple more mysterious tiny tubes of things that are briskly, professionally, smoothed onto and patted into her skin. The really impressive thing about the routine is how fast the many potions are applied. It takes Allison five minutes to make herself look—well, kind of the same, yet now mysteriously far shinier and more expensive and formidable. It’s like she’s spritzed herself with Movie Star. 

“What’s that one?” Vanya says, as Allison uncaps a little tube she’s never seen before, then scrubs it violently into her cheeks, forehead and chin. 

“It’s an exfoliant,” Allison says, “it takes off dead skin cells and brightens up your skin. Good quick pick-me-up if you’ve got an occasion.”

“Oh,” Vanya says. “What’s the occasion, protein bar breakfast?”

Allison turns. “Beating this wolf asshole into the ground.” She scrubs at her cheeks. “When I break his face, my skin’s going to be fucking radiant.”

Vanya raises an eyebrow. “Can’t argue with that.”

Vanya’s morning routine has fewer stages. Lever herself out of bed, splash some cold water and soap on her face and trudge like a zombie in the direction of caffeine, trying to pat out the rat nest on the back of her head as she goes. PB and J for breakfast? It’s got most of the important food groups covered. 

In the kitchen, Allison grabs an apple and a protein bar while Vanya makes her sandwich and gradually, sleepily picks up on the atmosphere in the kitchen. Luther and Diego are sitting tensely either side of the kitchen table, staring into their coffee mugs. 

“What’s going on?” Allison says, glancing between them. 

Diego just raises a finger and points through to the living room. 

Vanya turns her head and takes in the small slumped shape of Five, fully clothed, snoring on the couch. “Was Five up all night again?” 

“You could say that.” Diego hands her the coffee pot. “Or you could say he took the van out at 3am, zapped into a gas station to steal vodka, and sat out front getting trashed while the sun came up.”

“I found him at about six-thirty,” Luther adds. “He was, uh, ranting to the possum.”

“Oh, it gets even better,” Allison says, lifting a hand. 

“About the apocalypse, how we’re all doomed.” Luther furrows his brows, sinks a little coffee. “Guess that's one way to start the morning.”

“Shit,” Vanya says. She glances back at Five on the couch. “Is he okay? He seemed really freaked out in the night.”

“He thinks we’re imminently fucked,” Diego says, “and there’s nothing left to do but drink ourselves to death.” He raises his coffee mug. “Cheers.” 

Vanya winces, and takes a long pull of coffee. Oh yeah: the creepy cryptid hunting them, the crazy time-travelling gas masked death squad he’s apparently bringing along. She doesn't feel remotely ready for this, or inclined for it. Here’s the thing, though: if Five’s despairing, then it’s bad. And if Vanya can cause an apocalypse, she can stop one. If they're coming, the ones who killed Pogo and shot Klaus and tried to mess with Allison, then she's the one who can get between them and her family. She has to be ready.

“I need to practice,” she says, setting her mug down with a solid click. 

“You're good,” Luther says, too quickly. “We’ve all seen you in action recently, it's, you’re, you’re doing better.”

“No,” Vanya says, needled at his nerves. “If they're coming, I need to hit them hard and fast. I—I had to stop at the house because I whited out, I caved in the ceiling of that Walmart. I need to _know_ I've got enough control that I can go all out, well—not _all_ , but a lot, and—y’know.”

“Fuck ‘em up,” Diego offers gamely. 

“Yeah,” Vanya says. “Fuck ‘em up. So I need someone to spot me.” She looks at Luther, and as he shuffles nervously, she gets a little rush of confidence, and then feels ashamed at her own pettiness. 

“Oh,” Luther says. “Well, I’m going to, I gotta check the defence plan—”

“I’ll do that,” Allison says. 

Vanya insists. “Luther. I need to push myself. I need someone who can—”

“No way Luther can take you down,” Diego says.

“—who’s less breakable,” Vanya finishes. 

Luther blinks a few times. Then he says, “Okay. Sure.”

Vanya takes her violin and bow out to the woods, despite her misgivings: the violin is ancient and precious, enough she can barely afford the insurance. Dad never told her where it was from, of course, and no one’s ever been able to identify the maker, only that it’s as old as a violin can be, as old as the baroque pieces she plays on it. But no instrument has ever felt as good in her hands, as rich in tone, as responsive; and nothing helps her focus her power like playing does. So out she goes into the woods, violin case slung over her back, trying not to think about fragile four-hundred year old maple wood or irreplacability or horrific insurance deductibles. 

By the time she and Luther reach a good clearing to practice in, Vanya has other problems. Of course. Her skin is prickling all over; she keeps hearing Leonard’s creepy voice in her head. _Concentrate. You’re so powerful. They’re all afraid of you._ Oh, fuck him. He was so sweet at first; he looked at her like she was astonishing, as precious as the violin, and it felt like she was basking in the sun. God, does she feel stupid. This cabin has been far too much like his grandma’s place in the woods, ever since she got here. She hates knowing that in this new timeline, Leonard’s out there somewhere, probably still trying to figure out where she’s gotten to, maybe creeping around the Academy and her apartment, going through her stuff, and, ugh. Still, she’ll take it over knowing she left a corpse full of knives and a sin that’ll catch her up. 

“So, uh,” Luther says. 

Vanya manages a twitchy smile, then she sets her case on the ground, gets out her violin and bow, and straightens. Even with her eyes closed she can _feel_ Luther tensing. She’s never really practiced with him before. In 2003, mostly Five was the one who could sneak out easiest while she was at her supposed evening violin tuition on the other side of the city. They even had a regular practice spot in an abandoned industrial park out in the burbs. Much as she worried about hurting him, Five was never spooked by her, and she was grateful at least for that. 

Luther is very much spooked. Screw it. Whatever kind of killer Vanya is, whatever kind of person, they can’t afford to get squeamish right now. She has to be strong enough to protect her family. That’s what matters. 

She sets her bow to the strings, and lets the long slow notes that begin the Passacaglia ring out of her. The harmonics shiver out into the air, the motifs repeat and spiral. She rings. She resonates. She ignores the nervous shifting of her brother’s feet on the ground a few yards away, pulls the waves of vibration radiating from her down to a single quivering note, focussed like a whip. 

She pulls in a breath, lifts her bow. The vibration ripples upwards; high above her, a branch cracks. She holds the branch there for a moment, high up, shivering in mid-air. 

“Okay,” she says, opening her eyes. Her bow whips down and out; the branch crashes down and then with a flick of her wrist, she bats it at Luther’s chest. It’s eight foot long at least, and heavier than she thought it would be; it flies at him with momentum. He catches it in both hands, braced for it; his feet skid back a little in the leaf litter. 

Luther grins, bright and nervous. “Nice,” he says. “Want me to throw it back?”

His return throw is about as gentle and timid as tossing an eight foot branch could possibly be; he hardly seems to make an effort. Vanya’s own pulse throbs in her throat; she pushes out her left hand hard, still holding the neck of her violin, and a thick wall of energy shoves out. It slams the branch into Luther and then slams Luther to the ground, and she feels a burst of cool, violent satisfaction, like a hard exhale. A moment later she thinks, _oh shit_.

“Are you okay?” she calls, a fluttering panic high in her chest. “I’m sorry!” 

Luther’s already sitting up, brushing leaves off his jacket. “It’s okay,” he says, trying for a reassuring smile. “It’s fine. Soft ground, see?” He gets up, and they eye each other with a kind of mutual wary awkwardness. “Like you said,” Luther says, “I’m not that breakable.”

Vanya gives him a grin that’s probably just as unconvincing as his is. She kneels and starts putting away the violin and bow; her focus is good enough for practice, and the thought of accidentally trashing her violin is throwing her right off her stride. A better human being, Allison maybe, would have worried about breaking her brother first and her instrument second. At least Vanya’s got insight, huh? 

“Okay,” Luther says. “So they’re gonna come at you, the Commission guys. You’ve got your barriers to keep off fire, and we’ll have your back. But you’re little, so there’s definitely gonna be one idiot who thinks he can knock you out hand-to-hand before you do any damage.”

“You think?” Vanya says, deliberately mild. Luther winces. She lets him wince. She can’t count how many times she’s dreamt about choking, about waking up in that silent soundproof cell. It felt like being in a coffin at the bottom of the sea, suffocating.

“So … if we work on your defence a little?” Luther says. 

Vanya tilts her head and smiles with one side of her mouth. “Come at me, bro.”

Luther jogs back a few feet and turns. Vanya plants her feet a little. He could pick her up with one hand. Then she thinks, _I_ can pick _him_ up with one finger. Then Luther starts running, and suddently he’s barrelling at her like the world’s biggest quarterback, not holding back, and he’s _fast_ and he’s _big_. _Oh shit_ , she thinks, heart racing—and then she flicks a hand out and a wall of sound slaps him back to the ground. 

Luther tucks and rolls. He taps the ground before he sits up, and it takes her a moment for her memories of referreeing sparring bouts to come back to her. He’s tapping out.

“Okay, I’m gonna try to get near you,” he says, after he sits up. “Turn your back.”

Ten minutes later, Luther is panting and flushed from the fight, and Vanya is tuned in finely and humming with power, not even out of breath. The nearest he’s gotten to her is ten feet, and that’s when he came at her from behind with her eyes closed. Even that was easy.

“Let’s try closer,” he says. “You know, there are a whole bunch of ways they can get the drop on you. We could be fighting indoors, they could come down the stairs, or from round a corner. We need to do close quarters.”

“Okay,” Vanya says, “come on.” She spreads her hands and grins. Wow, is she turning into a cocky asshole? Maybe a little. Turns out stupid bullshit like hand-to-hand practice is actually kind of enjoyable when you’re winning at it. “You know, Diego’s been offering to show me for days how to flip him on his back with one hand.”

“I’m pretty sure you can already do that,” Luther says, with a grin. 

Vanya grins back. God, she didn’t think she’d get so sucked into this. This is _fun_. 

“But maybe that’s not a bad idea. In case you take a hit with the boom box gun thing? How long did it take you to recharge last time?”

“God,” Vanya says. “I don’t even know. I was driving, and then I think it was back when we got home, but I was just so exhausted.”

“That makes sense,” Luther says. “That you were so tired. You probably burn off a lot of energy, like Five when he jumps. Are you making sure to keep your blood sugar up?”

“I’m not so much on the protein bars,” Vanya says. 

“Snickers,”

Vanya tilts her head. Luther’s … gotten surprisingly chipper. “You seem pretty optimistic,” she says. 

Luther shrugs. “I think we’ve got a shot. Five doesn’t know everything. He just tries to.” 

They square up again. Or at least, Luther squares up and Vanya shuffles her feet and feels vaguely stupid; then she lets the wind through the trees ring through her and everything is fine again. 

Luther reaches forward, taps her on the shoulder a couple of times, and dances backwards. Oh, okay. Match started. 

He lunges for her and she flicks out a hand and flips him onto his back. Just a little pulse; feels okay. Luther’s on his feet in a moment. _Precise_ , she thinks, _play it_ , and the Passacaglia sings in her mind, and when he comes for her next time she throws up a barrier and lets it shiver, static, in the air. 

He steps back, panting. Vanya can feel that familiar smooth chilly feeling seeping into her. He can’t touch her. She can do this. She lets herself slide a little further into the resonance, then drops the barrier. Luther is instantly sprinting through, and she flicks him back. It’s easy. Everything’s fine. 

She closes her eyes, sending the vibrations out. She feels her way into making a bubble in the air, a dome of sound and force drawing together, waiting to come into focus. It shivers and now she pulls her hands in, to bring it in and make it solid and—there’s a hand clamping on her shoulder and Luther is right _there_ —her chin jolts up, her heart stutters in shock and she flinches— _no_ —an electric shock of terror right through her body, she can’t breathe, and she flings her arms up across her face and _pushes_ and the _no_ in her has turned calm and cold and smooth and powerful again—

Luther is in the air, flying backwards like a slingshot. He hits a tree trunk, twenty feet up, and there’s an instant, shattering crack. He falls. 

And as Vanya reverberates with utter horror, the trunk sways and crashes backwards. 

The resonance falls away from her instantly. She feels a foot smaller, terrified. She’s done it again. Luther’s on the ground and he’s on his front, not moving, crumpled in on himself. Oh god, she’s done it again. She sprints over to Luther, breath gasping, dizzy. She’s killed him. She knows. Oh god oh god, it was so fast, no time to think, how could she—

She puts a hand on his shoulder and tries to gently turn him. _Please, please—_

He groans and winces, rolls onto his back. It takes her three painful gasping breaths to get out the words. “I’m sorry!” she says, “I’m sorry, oh god, are you”—her throat closes, she wheezes in a couple more times and it releases— “are you hurt?” The next breath is another panicked wheeze. The fear carries her away. She curls forward on her knees, stupid and useless, heart hammering and fingers tingling, and her forehead hits the cool dirt. 

“Breathe,” Luther says. His fingertips touch her back. “Steady. It’s okay.”

He’s _comforting_ her. She nearly killed him, he must be hurt, he must be so angry. The ground is damp against her forehead. She still can’t breathe, still can’t bear it. Shes in a coffin at the bottom of the sea. Luther settles his hand onto her back, and simultanously she flinches and feels a warm relief. She doesn’t know up from down right now. 

“Your head’s down, good,” Luther says. “Now, remember the box breathing? In for four, hold for four.”

From the bottom of the sea, Vanya manages to nod. 

He talks her through it, counting out each breath and pause. His hand stays on her back, thumb rubbing slowly against her shirt. Her ears ring. Slowly, slowly, she comes back to herself. And after about a century, she rubs her face and sits up. 

Luther has a long scratch down the side of his face, and a rising bruise on his cheekbone. She can’t see anything worse, but. “Are you hurt?” she says. He shakes his head. “Oh. Thank god. I swear, I didn’t mean to,” she says. “I just.”

“Well,” Luther says gamely, “look at it positively. You were fast, you were deadly. Anyone who surprises you is probably going to be in trouble.”

Vanya barks a laugh. “Great,” she says. “Still super good at murdering my family.”

“You’re good at keeping us alive,” Luther says. He touches his fingertips to her upper arm. The gesture surprises her with its gentleness, the carefulness. “You’ve hardly even trained, but we’d all be dead a couple times over if it weren’t for you.”

“But—” Vanya’s frustrated now. She’s mad at herself. She’s mad at Luther, which is stupid and irrational but it’s like he’s pretending none of it even happened, none of the terrible things she’s done to the people she loves, to him, none of his anger or his fear or how it was when she crossed the line, she wasn’t his sister any more, just a target to be eliminated, or locked at the bottom of the sea—

“Breathe,” Luther says, very quietly. She was hyperventilating again. God. She hates this. 

“Don’t make me list out the shit I’ve done,” Vanya says. She pulls up her knees. “I know I’m dangerous.”

Luther frowns. “We’re all dangerous.”

“Huh,” Vanya says. “Are we locking Klaus in a soundproof vault later, then? Five? Allison?”

Luther winces. He’s giving her that wary look again, that look like she’s a bomb, and the slightest wrong move could set her off. 

“I know it must be hard,” Luther says. “You have to understand—trust me, I know it only takes a moment to do something you regret—”

“I know that!” Vanya snaps. “I know you’re scared of me! _I’m_ scared of me! I love Allison! I love Pogo! I would never do anything to hurt any of you, and I—I fucking _murdered_ you, all of you—”

“But we fixed it,” Luther says. “You’re better. It never happened.” 

“It happened to Five,” Vanya says. “He had to bury you all, you know that? I can’t undo his whole life. Or Allison, or anything anyone has to remember.” She squeezes her eyes shut, exhales forcefully. The wind drops. The air is still. 

“I can’t undo it either,” Luther says, into the silence. “I hurt you.” 

“Yeah,” Vanya says. “You did.” She shakes her head. “It’s nothing compared to my shit. I have no right to be mad—”

“Of course you do! God.” She looks up at him and blinks. He’s not being sarcastic—not that he ever is. He’s totally earnest. “It’s all my fault. I made you snap! I hurt you. I choked you out and locked you in that cage. I know what it was. I got Pogo to shut the door so I could test the hinges, and I couldn’t stay in there more than five minutes. It’s terrifying. The silence, the walls. It’s like being buried alive.”

Vanya stares at a leaf on the ground. That deep and total silence, yeah. She doesn’t know how long she was in there as a kid, just that nightmare feeling, hiding under the covers. It stayed with her always, even when she couldn’t place it. But when she woke up there again it was so much worse than she remembered. 

“I am so sorry,” Luther says. “I know it’s a little late for that, but. You came to talk, you came for help. I told myself I was doing the right thing, I convinced myself I had to do that to you. It’s not an excuse. It makes it worse I thought it through. I made you melt down.” 

“Nobody _made_ me,” Vanya says. “You can’t say that to the jury, can you? Oh, I was just upset. That lady was annoying me, this guy was a jerk. I only killed all those people because I was really pissed at them.”

“You _are_ angry. And you’re scared.” 

Vanya shakes her head. “Do I get to be? Ever now?” 

“You’re still human,” Luther says softly. There’s something in his eyes that gives her pause. “You’re still a human being, Vanya. I know it’s frightening.” 

Vanya wants to be angry. She can’t. She just crumples in. All that hurt, all that fear and misery, feels like it’s got no place to go anymore but herself. Her heartbeat throbs in her ears. The world starts to narrow, in and in to a leaf on the ground. 

Luther takes her hand. He leans in, makes eye contact. Vanya blinks and comes out of it, whatever it was. She shakes her head. 

“I can’t even apologise,” Vanya says. “How do you even apologise for murder? Allison won’t even let me talk about it.” 

“She doesn’t blame you,” Luther says. “She never did.” 

“Yeah,” Vanya says. “Well, I blame me.”x 

“You didn’t—Vanya, you’re so powerful. It takes work to control that. And your powers must have hit so hard, you went off those meds cold turkey—look, we know from 2003 how nasty they are to come off, remember when you got sick at dinner?” 

“Oh god,” Vanya says. “Dad was staring me out and I really thought I was gonna vomit into the vichyssoise.” 

“I always hated that stuff anyway,” Luther says. “It's the texture, it's like slime soup.” 

“Yeah,” Vanya says. “You know that stupid rule where we had to eat everything on our plates?” Luther nods. “It took me years afterwards to get out of the habit. Gulping down overdone broccoli like it’s medicine, and I'm in my apartment, totally alone.” 

“I still do it sometimes.” Luther shakes his head. “I got so used to being completely alone,” he points skywards with a finger, “but it took me years to shake that feeling. It's so hard not to feel like someone's watching your every move.” 

“Well,” Vanya says, “I guess that's what growing up with a CCTV camera in every room will do for you.” 

“You’re adjusting to so much,” Luther says. “I can’t imagine what that’s like. It was bad enough—you know how much stuff I broke, after—after the accident? Just, not knowing my own strength. And there were these mood swings the first few months, out of nowhere, just, the hormones. I felt like I was going crazy at first.” 

Vanya thinks of it. None of them even knew. God, the horror of waking up like that, no choice and no warning. Fuck Dad, fuck him. He was Dr freaking Moreau, he treated his kids like lab rats and what did he get? A Nobel Prize for the trophy cabinet and the media licking his butt when he got his sixteen year old son straight up killed. She imagines them all breaking into the house, getting Luther out of that mausoleum and away from that psychopath. It’s a fantasy. None of them were even talking to each other at the time, particularly her. Even time travel couldn’t fix that up. And Luther had to go through that alone. 

Vanya is quiet for a moment. She says, “I’m sorry. I never thought.” 

“I mean, I adjusted,” Luther says, “but I can’t even imagine. That was scary enough.” 

“It’s more than just that I’m not used to it. It’s like … it’s like I’m cold. I can only feel one thing, and it’s overwhelming. There’s no empathy. There’s nothing in my brain stopping me. I have to tell myself why, I have to tell myself the stuff I’m not feeling. I have to be so, so careful.” 

“It sounds.” Luther stops. “It sounds terrifying.” 

Vanya gives him a sad smile. “It isn’t. Not at the time. That’s kind of the problem. It’s like I’m someone else.” 

“Yeah,” he says. “Is it uncomfortable?” 

“Only after,” Vanya says with a humourless smile. “Is it for you? Uncomfortable? It must have been—I can’t imagine, either.” 

“It’s okay,” Luther says. He sighs, looks away and back. “No. No, it’s not really okay. Everything in me feels a little bit wrong. It’s never gone away, really. It’s hard to settle. I can’t explain it. It’s like there’s all this noise in the background, like when you can hear a drill somewhere and you just can’t relax.” 

“Oh,” Vanya says softly. 

“It was harder at first,” he says. “I told myself—I didn’t blame Dad, I—I had all this crap I said to myself. But it just. I’d catch a look at myself in a mirror, and I can’t describe it. It wasn’t me.” 

“You were on your own,” Vanya says. “In the house. None of us even knew. I don’t even know how you managed to get through that.” 

“I didn’t.” Luther’s eyes flick down right after he says it, like he already wishes he hadn’t. 

“Oh,” Vanya says softly. “Luther.” 

Luther stares at a stone on the ground. He looks shocked at himself, like he’s reeling as much as she is. He sucks in a breath. “Four months in,” he says. “I didn’t plan it. I thought I was okay, I thought I’d adjusted, I really did. But there was this one evening—I was doing nothing, just getting a glass of water, and it hit me. I was going to feel like this forever. And if I’d died that day, I wouldn’t feel like this. So I just thought okay.” 

Vanya feels livid with horror. She remembers Luther as a tiny child, blond and loud and gregarious; remembers him lighting bottle rockets with Five on the roof; remembers him boy-scout earnest and pompous at thirteen, red-eyed and stunned with grief at sixteen. She reaches out, slowly and carefully lays her hand on his arm, looking at him, checking in. 

Luther exhales, and hunches in like it’s a vain attempt to be smaller, and then his fingertips touch the back of her hand. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t even mean to say.” 

“It’s okay to talk about it, if you want to,” Vanya says. “If you don’t, that’s okay too.” 

“Pogo found me,” Luther says. He presses a thumb into the skin of his left wrist, under the cuff of his shirt. “Maybe he saved my life, I don’t know. It must have been horrible for him. I don’t know what I thought I was doing. Mom fixed me up, Dad told me how disappointed he was. Then he just pretended it never happened. You know. What you’d expect.” 

“I am so sorry,” Vanya says. “You went through all that alone.” 

Luther shrugs. “We all did. We were all alone.” He takes a breath. “Pogo tried to talk to me. He told me he knew what it felt like, being, y’know, like this. And I just—cursed him out. Said things I just really regret. Especially now.” 

“I’m sure he didn’t blame you,” Vanya says. “You know Pogo. I don’t think he could hold a grudge if he tried.” 

Luther nods and looks down. 

“I think he felt guilty,” Vanya says. “Just, about everything. Dad had this way … he made people accomplices. Allison said that. Maybe Pogo most of all.” 

Luther smiles at her a little wanly. His eyes look a little shiny. After a moment, he says, “Dad really found a unique way to screw over every one of us, didn’t he?” 

Vanya barks a laugh. “You think they give out Nobel Prizes for that? Innovation in shitty parenting?” 

“Maybe he got one already,” Luther says. “We should check the trophy cabinet." 

“How are you doing?” Vanya says. “Now? Is it any better?” 

“It’s okay,” Luther says. He shrugs. “I mean, it’s not, but it is what it is. It’s not okay, but I’m okay. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m glad I’m here. I like being alive. There are so many amazing things in the world. Sunsets, rooster sauce, side two of Purple Rain.” 

“Prince and hot sauce.” Vanya nods. “Can’t argue that.” 

“Some things make me feel better. Growing things. Being outdoors. Music helps the most. I don’t know why, but it does.” 

“Music gets inside you,” Vanya says. “That’s why I love it, I think.” 

“Yeah.” Luther nods. “I like that, it’s true, I think. Music gets to parts of you nothing else can.” He pauses and then suddenly goes very still. He whispers, “Don’t move. Look up slowly.” 

Heart hammering, Vanya looks up. 

It’s the goddamn possum. 

Jeff the possum, if it’s come to this and they’ve actually named him, is rooting around in the leaf litter a few feet away. Luther is watching him, entranced, with a goofy little smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. 

“Watch this,” Luther says. He digs a Clif bar out of his pocket and breaks off several pieces. He tosses them gently and with great concentration in a little trail in front of the possum. 

After a few moments, Jeff waddles over and sniffs the first piece of Clif bar. It’s definitely him. He’s tubby. Unless all the possums round here are that well-fed, which is a freaking possibility given how many of Vanya’s siblings seem to be giving Jeff dinner. He sits up, grasps the piece in his weird little hands and nibbles on it daintily. Then, at a leisurely pace, he wanders along to the next piece. 

“He seems pretty chill with people,” Vanya whispers. “I mean, I guess we’re basically his meal ticket now.” 

“I've been doing this since we got here,” Luther says. “He trusts me a lot more now.” He turns to Vanya and grins. “I’m trying to see if I can get him to take a piece out of my hand.” 

Vanya watches Jeff amble along. She thinks she’s warming to the weird little critter. Maybe that’s why most of them seem to like him so much? They’re all weird little critters too. 

__

***

“This is the worst party I've ever been to,” Klaus says to the man with no hands, “and believe me, there’s competition.”

He's in the great hall of the Academy, as Dad liked to call it, because “living room” is what normal people have. He's never seen so many people in this room in his entire life. He's pretty sure most or all of them are dead. Bullet wounds in the head and nooses as accessories are kind of a giveaway. 

The man with no hands, however, seems to be having a great time. He’s leaning on the bar, next to a bottle of German beer he's casually sipping through a straw. “I think it's quite a nice do,” he says. “Lovely venue. Bit too much taxidermy, though. Always a bit creepy, isn't it, with those beady little eyes following you about? Brr!” He waves his ruined hands around for emphasis, the same disturbing way he did in Hazel and Cha Cha’s motel room, and chuckles at his own joke. 

“Right,” Klaus says, looking around the room, horribly distracted. If his subconscious really did arrange this, it hates him even more than he thought. He’s looking for one single weird cryptid Commission agent, so of course his brain gives him every random ghost he's ever had the misfortune of tangling with, all at once. Although not, apparently, the one person he wants most in the world to see. He looked for Dave already, of course. First thing he did.

Looking around again, he realises he can place pretty much everyone here after a moment’s thought. Commission agents, bank robbers from his teens, a couple more of Hazel and Cha Cha’s victims, that asshole from the ambushed platoon who used to come find him and Dave when they'd snuck off and yell uninventive insults at them during intimate moments. And oh, what a lovely surprise, it's _those_ guys: the mausoleum ghosts who spent so many nights of his childhood polishing him up a great case of post-traumatic stress. Klaus sucks in a shaky breath and finds, to his surprise, that on seeing them again in the non-flesh, he is not having a panic attack. In fact, watching at least three of them kicking back on Dad’s couches with little glasses of wine and nibbles, he has a powerful urge to take this opportunity to go over there and give them a piece of his mind. 

He strides over, determined now. A bunch of people call out “Hey, Klaus!” as he weaves his way through the crowd. Oh yay, he can barely imagine anything more fun than gathering a hundred ghosts in his shitty childhood home so they can all harass him at once. 

“Hello,” he says, sugary and insincere, to the mausoleum ghosts as he reaches them. “Looks like you're all having a lovely time.”

“Oh yes,” says the old lady in the crinoline—Edith? Emily? “Thank you for the kind invitation. Nice to get out.”

The others murmur yeses. The tall guy with the face like a bloodhound grins and raises his glass. Klaus never knew his name but he used to call him Screaming Pete, because he'd just get right in his face and do these primal screams. Klaus had been eight the first time and he'd straight up peed his pants. 

“Good day to you, young man,” says Screaming Pete. Klaus doesn’t remember him ever talking coherently before. He has a plummy, cut-glass English accent that reminds Klaus very unpleasantly of Dad. “Haven’t you grown? And might I say, you've got an awful lot better at this.”

“Oh, yes,” says the tubercular young man whose signature move used to be clawing at Klaus’ legs and wheezing while holding a bloodied handkerchief. What did Klaus call him? Nosferatu the vampire, that was it. Way to make it worse. “This little gathering is so much more civilised.” He has a plate of little cookies in his hand. Why the hell does he get little cookies? 

“ _So_ much more civilised,” Klaus repeats, with as much acidity as he can muster. 

“If I were you, though, I should take myself off and put on at least a smoking jacket and a shirt,” Screaming Pete says. “And a properly-knotted tie. I’ve no idea what the fashionable gentleman’s wearing these days, but I can tell you that by _my_ standards your attire is barely fit for mixed company.”

“You were such a sweet little boy,” says maybe-Edith, apropos of nothing, before Klaus can even get out a comeback to the last outrage. 

“Oh, thank you,” Klaus says. “Do you always greet cute kids by screaming in their faces that you’ll curse their face off if they don't save you from eternal perdition?”

“Steady on, my boy,” says Screaming Pete. “That's a tad unfair. Hard for you to understand, I'm sure, but dying is absolutely vexatious on the nerves.”

Klaus laughs, short and hysterical. “Oh, well. Sure I wouldn't know. Anyway, guys, thanks for two decades of nightmares.”

“Don't be so melodramatic,” says Screaming Pete. “You turned out fine, clearly didn't do you any harm. Dare say it was character-building.”

Klaus stares. After a moment, he gathers himself to snort another laugh. “Wow. Fucking wow.” 

“Language!” says the tubercular young man. “Ladies present.” 

Klaus rolls his eyes. “ _Character-building? Go put on a tie?_ ” he says, imitating Screaming Pete’s nasal, clipped voice. “Seriously, have you people been talking to my dad?”

Klaus sincerely hopes they haven't _actually_ been talking to Dad. That would be just peachy, wouldn't it, the old bastard showing his face here too?

“Okay,” he says, “well, this was nice. I’m gonna go frighten the horses somewhere else. Thanks for being such sadistic dicks, enjoy the tiny cookies, fuck you all.”

Maybe-Edith emits a theatrical gasp of horror. Screaming Pete tuts loudly.

Klaus has already turned his back. He flips them all the bird with both hands as he walks away. Oddly enough, it's kind of cathartic.

“Hey there,” says a failed bank robber Klaus only recognises from the plastic Donald Duck mask pushed back on his head. “Boy, did you get tall.” 

Klaus is on the verge of just flashing him the goodbye hand then giving him the finger, but he reins himself in. It's too easy to take his bad moods out on the ones who aren't being dicks. Besides, the quickest way out of this literal nightmare is finding who he's actually looking for. “Hey,” he says, “you haven't happened to see a guy with a wolf head?”

“Nah,” says the bank robber. “Damn, though, wish I'd gone with wolf. Better than spending eternity as a cartoon duck.”

Klaus weaves through the crowd and keeps asking. 

“Hey,” he says, after about a hundred hopeful questions and about a hundred blank looks, cheerful nopes and unsolicited comments on his appearance. (Mental note, if there's a next time, he’s doing this in a ballgown and heels.) Klaus is talking to yet another suited-up Commission agent. There are a ton of them here; he guesses he can thank Ben for about half, his other siblings for most of the rest, and yeah, he should probably put himself in there too. This agent is young, pink-faced and solid, with his gas mask pushed up on his forehead, a bottled beer in his hand and a couple of bloody bullet holes in his chest. “Odd question,” Klaus says, “but did you happen to see a colleague of yours with a gross bespoke wolf head?”

“Nope,” says the agent. “Sounds like a Metaphysics Department job. Those guys need reining the fuck in, if you ask me.” He looks at Klaus quizzically. “Hey, you don't recognise me, do you?” Klaus has an abrupt sinking feeling. The agent gestures at his bloody chest. “Ring any bells?” Crap. It’s the guy with the assault rifle, from the shoot-out at the house. “Look how close together you got those! Nice.” 

“Okay, so in my defence,” Klaus says, “ _you_ shot _me_ in the chest first.”

“No hard feelings,” says the agent, grinning and slapping Klaus on the arm. “That's how it fuckin’ goes, eh?”

“Yup, it does,” Klaus says. He’s warmed to the guy automatically, one grunt to another. “So, no wolf man. You happen to see a Jersey mafioso with half a face and a primo 1970s leisure suit?” The agent looks blank. Klaus carries on hedging his bets. “Okay. What about, say, a polite elderly chimpanzee wearing a lot of tweed? Or, I dunno, old guy with a monocle?”

“The chimp has a monocle?” says the agent. “Dude, what are you smoking?”

“Sadly, nothing,” Klaus says. “Okay,” he continues, with a burst of nervous courage. “Okay then. What about, uh, a tall guy, curly brown hair, really nice shoulders, fantastic arms, blue eyes, very pretty, total snack, probably wearing army greens and kind of bloodied up. See anyone like that?” 

“Is this someone specific,” the Commission agent says, “or like, a wish list?” 

Klaus sighs. “I want to say both,” he says, “but yeah. Someone specific. Never mind.”

“Welp,” says the agent, “good luck with finding the werewolf and the monocle chimp and the hot GI. You got some interesting friends. Thanks for the beer.”

“You're welcome,” Klaus says, slightly cautious. “Hey, another favour? You know how some people, dead people, like to show up around 2am to scream at not-yet-dead people, maybe especially the guy who killed them? I can actually hear that shit, and it’s not _quite as soothing_ as those nature sounds tapes, in terms of y’know, actually getting to sleep, so …”

“No problem,” says the agent. “We’re good, man. I'd go scream at the A-hole that planned this operation, but y’know, the Commission home office is back in the Fifties. Time travel’s a bitch, you feel me?”

Klaus sighs. “I feel you.” He winks and moves on. There’s a young woman behind the bar, pouring measures into a cocktail shaker. He struggles to place her for a moment, then the oversized eighties t-shirt nightgown clues him in. It’s the Persian girl with the pillow from the motel room, one of Hazel and Cha-Cha’s previous guests. “Hey,” he says, hopping onto a bar stool. “Noor, right?”

“Klaus!” Noor says. “It’s so great to see you, I love your place. Are you dead now?”

“Nope,” he says, resting his chin on his hand. “Just dead tired. How've you been?”

“Great!” she says. Klaus tilts his head, because people aren't usually that enthused about being dead. The dream place seems to really chill people out; it's hard to get used to. “So much happier since I stopped following that pair of murdering assholes round the world’s shittiest hotels.”

“That does sound like a bore,” Klaus says. “I was feeling pretty done with those two after two days. Where's the pillow?”

Noor shrugs. “Ditched it. Who needs to be dragging that round for eternity, am I right?”

Klaus tilts his head, delighted. 

“I really owe you for the closure, you know?” Noor says. She flips her big mane of wavy hair from one side to the other, then measures out a shot of Kahlua and tips it into a cocktail shaker. “Espresso martinis!” she says. “I used to be famous for these.”

“In 1980s Iran?”

Noor winks at him. “There ain’t no party like an illegal house party with a solid chance of being raided by the religious police.” She raises a cocktail glass. “Want one?”

Klaus opens his mouth for a regretful _nah_ , then thinks, hey. This is the astral plane or whatever, and he’s very stressed. It doesn’t even count. “Thank you,” he says. “That sounds delightful.” Noor is already shaking the cocktail above her head. She pops the cap on the shaker, then from a theatrical height she pours the contents into two waiting martini glasses. The chill from the cold drinks is already beading up the glass. She pushes one towards him. “Cheers,” Klaus says, picking it up.

The stem of the glass is warm in his hand. Warm? He glances down and—really, brain? Really?—he's holding the handle of a mug of black coffee.

“Huh,” Noor says. “I guess your subconscious must have really wanted the pure caffeine.”

“Did it fuck,” Klaus says. “My subconscious is just obnoxious.” He sighs, takes a sip. It’s good. It is, in fact, really fantastic coffee. It tastes like roasting coffee beans smell. _Brain_ , he thinks, _oh shitty brain, if you're trying to make a point, why not consider being this supportive when I'm actually awake?_ “Chin chin,” he says, raising his coffee mug. “Oh! You haven’t seen a guy with a wolf head?”

“Ew,” Noor says. “Nope.”

“Exactly,” Klaus sighs, propping his chin on a hand.

“Hey,” Noor says, pointing up, “have you checked upstairs? This place goes on for days.”

Up on the balcony, Klaus scans the crowd of annoyingly chill dead partygoers. Nope, nobody down there he’s looking for. Certainly no bipedal wolves. He should have come up here in the first place. 

He looks down the length of the balcony, into the corridor that leads to their old bedrooms. It's dark down there. 

It’s not so dark that he misses a door swinging open, then the movement of a tall figure from one room to another. 

Klaus steps quietly along the balcony in the direction of the corridor. Whatever it is moves too. He’s close enough now to hear a heavy tread, and to see another door opening, a figure vanishing around the corner. 

He’s really feeling a little unarmed right now. 

Klaus casts his eyes around, hoping to see one of Dad’s numerous decorative rifles and swords, or even to remember somewhere the old man had stashed a pistol. Of course at the moment he needs it, there’s nothing. Improvisation it is. There’s that gross stuffed meerkat with a lampshade on the top of its head, sitting on a side table. Klaus remembers throwing it over the bannisters when he was twelve and then claiming it had jumped because it couldn’t stand the indignity any more. Klaus hefts it. It’s got a nice heavy marble base. 

“Okay, you’ll do,” he says to the meerkat. It looks back at him with beady glass eyes. No hands guy had a point. Klaus pulls a face, yanks the cord out the wall, hefts that too. 

Okay. Get it done. Klaus marvels that he’s turned, somehow, into the sort of idiot who does things like this. Wasn’t there a time, five minutes ago or maybe about a century, when instead of this half-assed attempt to kick ass and keep this cryptid douche away from his family, he would have been running, with little regret, straight in the opposite direction? Yeah. He would have gotten about a continent away, dived headfirst into a bottomless pit of drugs, incompetent impulse crime and bad-idea sex, and not found out what happened or even seen any of them apart from Ben for a year or three, next time he was desperate enough to scam them for drug money or bail or somewhere to sleep.

It all sounds very relaxing, and very impossible. 

He used to know, for good or (mostly) for ill, exactly who and what he was. Everyone else knew too. These days, he doesn’t even recognise himself half the time, and it seems like half the time no one notices and the other half they’re as baffled by the changes as Klaus is. Who is he now? He’s heartbroken: that’s new. He’s a world-class idiot, which is less new. He’s clean, and even after six months, sobriety still feels like rubbing his brain against a cheese grater twenty-four seven. He’s using a stuffed meerkat as a weapon against a dream-stalking surgically-enhanced cryptid, in a dreamscape full of ghosts he cooked up using a power he didn’t know he had two days ago. If this was a horror movie, he’d call it overwritten and change the channel to The Golden Girls. He could put that on his tombstone, maybe. God, he hopes he lives long enough to come up with something a little wittier. 

There’s movement ahead. How are the lights not working, isn’t this supposed to be his dream? Fuck, what if Quantum Freddy took the lightbulbs out? Why didn’t Klaus hit up the armory or Dad’s study before he did this? Why is he incapable of planning more than five seconds ahead?

Klaus bites his lip, hefts the meerkat a little higher, and makes himself step cautiously forward. One step, then another—

A hand lands on Klaus’ shoulder, there’s a voice in his ear—his whole body jack-knifes with shock and he wheels round, arms flailing out, raises the meerkat lamp over his head—

“Klaus,” Dave says. 

“ _Jesus Christ what the fuck_ ,” Klaus yells, and his hands open and jitter and he drops the meerkat lamp. 

The meerkat’s head breaks off. 

“Christ, Dave, I nearly had a fucking heart attack,” Klaus says, leaning in, like Dave just tapped him on the shoulder while he was cleaning his rifle, like he just got taken by surprise is all, like they’ve only been apart a few minutes. “Meerkat lamp’s fucked,” he says, and his hands are on Dave’s shirt now, shaking, and he hears Dave saying his name, softly, so softly, and the words just keep on bursting out of him as he stares at Dave like an idiot, unable to take him in. Dave looks—he just looks like himself, standing there in his uniform pants and tee, no wound, not even a speck of dirt on him. 

“Oh god,” Klaus says, again and again, “that was, oh god, oh my god,” and he wants to burst into tears but he can’t even catch a breath. 

Dave’s eyes are so wide, his hands curving around Klaus’ shoulders, thumbs stroking over his skin, touching him in that careful tender way that he's missed so fucking bad, and it’s the most calming thing, but he can feel Dave’s hands trembling, can see his lips parted and his eyes one blink away from tears as they draw each other in. 

“I know,” he hears, from the best voice in the world: the voice he, he of all people, thought he’d never hear again. “I know. Oh god, I know.”

***

For much of the day, Five dozes on the couch, drifting between bad dreams and a vicious frontal headache. He dreams of fields of bone; of the poisoned heaving bulk of the Potomac River, sour and yellow-white like rancid milk; of the starving coyote he found out in the Des Moines ruins, last one he ever saw. He dreams of that giant tropical fish in Hendrickson's penthouse office, luminous-fronded and impossibly large, swimming in darkness behind the desk, around and around. He dreams it's speaking to him.

He wakes, dry-mouthed and nauseous, and immediately vomits into the Walmart grocery bag some kind soul left by the couch next to his head. 

Someone left a bottle of water too. For a few minutes he lays about, trying to persuade his stomach to accept a few sips. In the kitchen there's Advil, and coffee once he can ingest some without ralphing it up. Feels like an hour’s hike away. 

The house is quiet. Fortunate, because right now his head is extremely loud. 

He always appreciated that about this house: the quiet of the place. A rich kind of quiet: the rustling of the green forest, bird calls, the humming of insects. It sounded like things growing here, he remembers saying once to Dolores, not like the windblown silence of his camps in the apocalypse. She'd replied he was tipsy, and getting sentimental. As usual, she was right. 

Quiet still soothes him; he remembers how the noise of a living city would scrape his nerves, after the Commission found him and began to train him. It took some adjusting. He used to take walks and time himself with a stopwatch, trying to adapt himself to the hectic storm of sights, motion, sound, smells: the teeming anthill of human existence. His old, remembered adolescent archness came in surprisingly handy. When he was at a loss, or overwhelmed, or socially awkward or, on occasion, terrified, then striking a distant, chilly attitude was a reliable cover. Nobody in the first year or so commented that he came off like a twelve year old’s impression of Sherlock Holmes, so he figured it was working. It’s moulded to him like armour now, that attitude; hard to slip it off, even if he wants to. Lucky for him, he doesn’t have to concern himself with self-improvement, because he and his family have mere days to live. If that. 

The bald fact of it is: he can't see a way out of this. He's staring at checkmate, driving himself mad trying to see if he's missed something: at this stage, anything would do. It's happened so much faster than he thought it would. He supposed part of him thought that he’d have enough time to figure something out, somehow. 

Luther said he should listen to the rest of them; that he should try seeing what ideas his siblings have. Well, what do they have? 

Luther has a defence plan which should keep them all alive fifteen minutes longer. If Five could think of something useful to do in those fifteen minutes, that could be helpful. It's not. 

Klaus’ plan, impulsive and poorly-conceived, amounts to charging into the dream place to find the wolf man and get himself slaughtered slightly ahead of schedule. Five supposes the objective response to that is that at this stage of things, with all but one them about to be very dead and the apocalypse scheduled back in the calendar, Five should just let Klaus take the shot, regardless of the odds. It's hard to be objective when you've dreamed of your brother’s dead eyes for forty-five years. 

Vanya wants to fight—which, of course, is exactly what the Commission want. Her phenomenal power is offset by her limited control and her total strategic inexperience. With time, he knows she'd learn finesse; it's a safe bet given her music is like sharing a room with the harmony of the spheres. They don't have that time. Right now she's as subtle as a grenade, and her power will light her up for miles, and they’ll be ready for her. They'll hit her with the boom box until she goes down, and then they'll have her, and it'll all be over. For them and for the rest of the world.

Voices drift down from upstairs; someone is here after all. Diego and Allison. Five listens for a few minutes, dozy and nauseous. He can’t pick out the words, but he finds himself oddly comforted by the low sounds of their bickering voices. 

He’s blindsided by how hard and fast the memory hits him this time. The electrical fire smell of the air, the wind too warm and full of choking dust, their slack dead faces, the horrible quiet. He remembers his muscles shaking and watery with effort, dragging Diego to that shallow grave, remembers the strangeness of dealing with a corpse for the first time: the chill and the give of the flesh and the weight and stiffness. He remembers how Diego’s chest was crushed right in, a big concave dent like it’d been smashed in with a bowling ball. 

Five can hear Dolores’ voice in his head, calmly acerbic: _well, looks like you’re still a little drunk._ Right as usual: time to make the trek to the kitchen and a pot of coffee. After that, a clean shirt. When Lord Byron was depressed, apparently he would always put on a clean shirt. Five’s always found that solid advice. 

When Diego and Allison walk in ten minutes later, Five has a mug and a quarter of black coffee in him, a clean shirt on, and his face firmly back in place. 

“You were being unusually quiet,” Five says, arching an eyebrow. “What were you doing?”

“We were up on the roof,” Diego says, with more smugness than that statement deserves. 

“Because?” Five says, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“We’re checking out all methods of entry. Going over Luther’s cabin defence plan. He left out the roof.”

Five winces and takes a good swig of coffee. “It occur to you that might be because it makes no sense at all for the Commission to come in that way?”

Allison catches Five’s eye significantly and lifts her eyebrows. Five tilts his head and gives her a marginal smirk. 

“I dunno how they plan their ops,” Diego says. “Maybe they parachute in?”

“And why would they do that when they could use the cover of the woods followed by some of the many available windows and doors?” 

“Maybe they’re just amazing lateral thinkers,” Allison says. Her arms are folded and her voice has that teasing edge. “Great minds think alike, huh?”

Diego swivels his gaze between them. “You two done being smart? At least I spent the afternoon doing something more productive than vomiting into a grocery bag.”

Lacking a good response, Five falls back on a glare. Glares have served him well over the years for this exact purpose, among others. “What about the others?” he says. “Why’s everyone out?”

“Luther’s spotting Vanya for practice out in the woods,” Allison says.

“What about Klaus?” Five says. A little buzz of alarm goes through him. Five’s fight-or-flight response is both trained and nicely tuned; when it tells him something's wrong, he listens. 

Allison frowns. “I think he was out on the porch earlier. He kind of lives there right now.”

Five gets to his feet and sinks the rest of his coffee mug in one long pull. He sets it down with a decisive click and marches out of the kitchen. He heads straight through the living room, and after a moment he hears the others following. His attention’s on the porch. He pulls open the screen door.

The porch is empty. 

“How long’s he been gone?” Five says. 

Then, almost in unison, the three of them mutter, “Oh shit.”

***

When Klaus is able to form a thought again, they’re sitting on the edge of the bed in Klaus’ old bedroom. Klaus vaguely remembers stumbling in here. He’s frankly too dazed to be sure of anything.

Except one. Dave is holding him. He found Klaus, or Klaus found him. It really happened. They’re gripping hands so tightly that Klaus can feel his pulse throbbing against the contact. Klaus breathes Dave in, face turned into the crook of his neck. Dave is resting his chin on top of Klaus’ head, and Klaus can feel Dave’s throat working against his cheek, can feel his chest heaving deep sobbing breaths. Klaus’ eyes are wet and his chest hurts and every time he blinks there’s more. Dave is holding him so carefully. Klaus is pretty sure out of the two of them Dave is the one who gets to be held while he cries right now, Dave’s the one who died, the one who waited for fifty years. 

Klaus takes a couple of deep breaths, rubs his eyes with the knuckles of his free hand. He _will_ get his crap under control for Dave. He wants to say, _I’m sorry I cried, you’re comforting me, it should be the other way around, come here._ He draws back and meets Dave’s eyes to say it. Apart from all the initial gasping and cursing, they’ve still barely said a word to one another. Dave, red-eyed, manages a shaky smile. Klaus puts a hand up, cups Dave’s cheek, thumbs away tears and smiles back. His chest squeezes itself again and he loses the battle with himself and ends in another sob. _God, look at us, what a soggy mess_ , he wants to say, but instead when he opens his mouth, they both lean in and they kiss. 

It’s so much of a better idea. They click together like magnets, just like always, like it’s only been a moment. Calm soaks right through him. He feels Dave relax too, feels him loosen up and slow. Dave’s back is warm under his shirt, his hand is so warm on the back of Klaus’ neck. Klaus dreamed miserably of this moment so many times, of how being in each others’ arms is peace, home, understanding, how he never knew anything like it, how it was gone gone gone from this world. But it’s death and grief that feel like the dream now. In all his dreams, he never imagined how ordinary and right this moment would feel.

They kiss and kiss. They go slow and tender, fast and frantic, deep. They stop for breath, leaning in, and mutter words, _okay_ and _I love you_ and Klaus finds himself saying _please stay, stay_ again and again. 

“Hey,” Dave says, drawing back enough to look Klaus in the eye. 

“Oh?” Klaus says, only half-listening because now he needs to focus on Dave’s face, he never had a photograph of his own and he worried so much he’d forget. God, he’s so beautiful. He reaches out and touches the corner of his mouth, the line of his cheekbone. 

“Were you looking for someone?” Dave says. “When I found you? In here? Is something going on? Should we—”

“Oh,” Klaus says. “Them. They can wait.” He waves an arm at the door, surprises himself with the violence of the gesture as he does it because he wants to _slam_ it, to draw the bolts and the locks and then—the door slams, the bolts draw, the key turns in the lock. 

Klaus’s shoulders jump in shock and he stares at his hand. He looks at Dave, mouth open. Dave doesn’t look as surprised as he should. “I can’t usually do that,” Klaus says, just in case Dave thinks that Klaus forgot to roll out that being a human ouija board from the future, he dabbled in telekinesis.

“What about here?” Dave says. 

“What _about_ here?” Klaus says. “It’s my dad’s creepy old house, you like it?”

Dave grins and shakes his head, and he moves past the joke, because he somehow always knows when to do that. “I mean, didn’t you conjure up this place or something?”

Klaus shrugs, pulls a face. “I dunno. When do I ever have any idea how my stupid powers work?” Something unpleasant occurs to him. For a moment he wants desperately not to follow it up. Then he has to. “Dave,” he says slowly. “Tell me something only you know.”

Dave frowns. “Are you checking I’m me? Okay. I dunno, how about our entire thing?”

Klaus raises his eyebrows. “You still actually think no one knew about that?”

“No, I! Wait, yes—who knew?” Dave looks charmingly boggled. Klaus forgot that look he’d get, and now he wants to kiss him again. “I mean,” Dave says, furrowing his brows, “I guess maybe Navarez knew something was up, remember he told me he didn’t give a damn what we did in our spare time as long as we went off camp to do it so he didn’t have to write it up?” Dave pauses. “I still think maybe he thought it was drugs.”

“Oh my god,” Klaus says. “He did not think it was drugs, he would have had to write up most of the platoon. Plus I told you, I smoked pot with him and Jump behind the jeeps like, a dozen times. Navarez thought we were banging the hell out of each other every time we could grab ten minutes out of earshot. Are you blushing?”

Dave is. He looks to the side, shakes his head, grinning, caught out. 

“How are you still blushing?” Klaus says, delighted. “It’s fifty years ago! And it was _so much_ banging, oh my god.” Klaus presses a dramatic hand to his chest and flutters his eyelids, and that gets Dave properly laughing, grinning from ear to ear, and it’s the most right and beautiful thing Klaus has seen in a long time. He leans in and says in Dave’s ear, _sotto voce_ , “You remember that time we snuck out of camp at midnight and you did me against that tree?”

Dave looks at Klaus out the corner of his eye, god, the side-eye flirt, Klaus forgot how _effective_ it is. “I can’t believe we didn’t get bitten on the ass or shanked by VC. It was so dumb.”

“It was _so_ dumb,” Klaus stage-whispers. “So dumb and _so_ good. Also, it was your idea.” He gets another laugh and it’s too cute. He wants Dave to laugh, wants him to smile, wants him to have everything in the world that is in Klaus’ limited and incompetent power to give him. He kisses the corners of Dave’s mouth. 

Dave pulls back and raises an eyebrow, but he’s still smiling. “I thought we were checking I’m not a demon or a doppleganger or something?”

“Yeah, we were” Klaus sighs. He pulls Dave down into a hug, strokes his hair. “I got distracted.” He noses Dave’s ear. God, he smells so good. “I thought I dreamed you up, maybe. But nah. Definitely not.”

“I’m too convincing?”

“You're too ridiculous,” Klaus whispers in his ear, and Dave chuckles.

They’ve moved back against the headboard, and now Dave shifts his weight forward, Klaus settles his hands on Dave’s hips to draw him on top of him. God, this is exactly what he needs right now, to feel pushed down, to feel the grounding comfort of Dave solid and heavy and warm on top of him, his own body pressed back onto the mattress, to feel absolutely _here_. What does Dave need? He’s kissing Klaus, not talking, but his body is eloquent. This. Dave wants this just as much. They kiss a little more. It's so good. Dave has a hand on his thigh, curves it into the crease between thigh and butt and gives a little squeeze. Getting handsy, nice.

“I can't believe these leather pants,” Dave says. “You wear them outside?”

“Mm,” Klaus says, “they're my favourites. Like ‘em?”

Dave just chuckles into the side of his neck. “Oh my god,” he says. “You're such a wild card, I've missed that. I've missed everything.”

“I've missed—” Klaus doesn't know what to say. Every second since Dave died has been a second with the absence of him. There hasn’t been a fucking moment, it feels like, where he hasn’t wanted to turn his head and say “hey, Dave”, and see his face. Every atom of him misses every atom of Dave, that's what it is. “Everything,” he whispers. “Everything about you. Kiss me some more.”

They do. They’re all over each other now, hands roving freely, just like any other time that separation and danger has been followed by the utter luxury of a locked door and enough time that they can temporarily banish the ticking clock. This is so damn real, as real as the wolf biting into his arm but a hell of a lot more welcome.

“Hey,” Dave says in his ear. “I, uh. I don’t want to debase the moment, but can we—?”

Klaus answers him with a laugh before he even asks. “Are you kidding me? Can we please debase the hell out of it before the top of my head comes off? Right now. Sooner. Last week.” He can’t stop smiling. He feels like he’s constantly on the verge of laughing or crying. 

Dave moves on top of him again, and kisses his neck, and Klaus wants to ask if he was lonely, if it felt like fifty years, but this is now, and now everything is all right. _Get it while you can_ was always their rule. And they’ve got time now, they’ve got time, and the rest of it can just wait …

***

“Five?” Allison says. Her stomach has dropped. Not again. What’s it take for them to learn? What has to happen?

“Klaus said he wanted to go look for the wolf man,” Five says slowly, frowning. 

“Yeah,” Diego says, “but like, in his head. Wouldn’t he just be here, meditating or whatever?”

“We’ve been going round the house all afternoon,” Allison says. “We’ve been everywhere. He’s not here.” She shakes her head. “How could we not have realised he was gone?”

Five massages his temple with his fingertips, huffs. 

Diego folds his arms. “We spread out, we search the woods.”

“Why would Klaus be in the woods?” Allison says. 

“I dunno,” Diego says. “But if—if something happened, maybe there’d be signs—” 

“The lake!” Allison says. It comes to her in a flash of alarm. “What if he was looking for somewhere quiet to do his thing? He could have gone there.” Or. She doesn’t need to mention the other possibilities. They’ve had too many close calls, they’re just jumpy, that’s all. 

“I’m coming,” Diego says, and Five jumps up too, not saying anything. Allison is already down the porch steps and sprinting down the dirt path. 

She sees as soon as she rounds the bend that reveals the shore. At first she tells herself that in the distance it could be something else. But it isn’t. It’s the pink cushion Klaus had taken from the broken couch that morning, and Klaus is slumped over on his side next to it, like he was sitting there before he fell, and the wind is blowing through his hair, and he’s not moving, not at all. 

She reaches his side and touches his shoulder—his skin is cool, but that's just the chill in the evening air—then she turns him onto his back. His eyes are closed to slits, the pupils unmoving. There isn’t a mark on him. His chest looks too still. She touches his mouth, can’t feel him breathing. 

She can hear the others’ footsteps running behind her, pulling up. With shaking fingers, she goes to take his pulse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey there, readers. I realise this fic and more to the point, TUA itself is chock-full of trauma and sads all the way through so we’re all used to that, but that scene with Luther and Vanya back there was a little heavy to write for me because of the stuff it brought to mind, and maybe—or maybe not—for you to read. So just in case anyone reading this is generally feeling like poop atm, then here are some trustworthy resources and real humans you can talk to, by phone or by text or online chat:
> 
> [Big list of general and specific US resources](https://afsp.org/find-support/resources/), [international resources by country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines), [LGBTQ+](https://itgetsbetter.org/get-help/) and [trans resources](https://www.glaad.org/transgender/resources), [The Trevor Project](https://www.thetrevorproject.org/).   
> I send all the love. (Ultimately, at least IMO, this show is about growth and struggle and healing in the face of trauma. I’m rooting for you.)


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